2 Crispin Place, London E1 (0845 686 1122)
Meal for two, including wine and service, £60-£90
At the top of the menu at Canteen, in London's Spitalfields, is what I suppose is called a mission statement. It says things like, 'Canteen is committed to providing honest food, nationally sourced, skilfully prepared and reasonably priced'. If I were being cynical I might suggest that, without this information, I would have assumed the food was dishonest, sourced from Tajikistan, prepared with no skill whatsoever and flogged at prices akin to a mugging. Happily, though, Canteen is one of those rare places which rids of me cynicism.
Still, I'm intrigued by these declarations because too often they turn up on the menus at 'modern British' places. The disappointing Roast, in Borough Market, name-checked all their suppliers. Throgmortons, which I liked even less, goes on about 'classic British food' and the joys of organics. The far better Inn the Park, in St James's Park, wields many of the same slogans. I can only assume this is down to some deep-seated culinary cringe, a belief that the dishes themselves won't sound good enough, unless some blather about the nun-like purity of the ingredients is given in mitigation. I cannot think of any French or Chinese restaurant which would bother to do this. The most you can expect out of one of those is a 'may contain traces of nuts' slug at the bottom.
As I say, it does not help that too many of these messages turn up on the menus of very bad restaurants. Canteen works, I think, not just because, generally, the food delivers, but because the proposition is right. The name is not a knowing joke as it was, say, when Marco Pierre White opened his Michelin-starred Canteen down at Chelsea Harbour in the early Nineties. The space is a clean, modernist glass box in a shopping development so new that Crispin Place does not yet appear on most London maps. Inside, most of the seating is made up of shared blonde-wood refectory tables, plus a few equally utilitarian booths. Our service was friendly and brisk (if a little overly solicitous; my purpose there had been rumbled). It looks indeed like the sort of canteen a thrusting architectural practice might build for itself.
The menu has the same user-friendly approach. There is a list of all-day breakfast items - bacon sandwiches or mushrooms on toast, both at £4.50, alongside toasted crumpets and butter at £2 - as well as a more standard selection of starters and mains. Cleverly they have also gathered together a group of items from these lists titled 'fast service', for those in a hurry. In another gear, there's a set of big sharing dishes - rib of beef with Yorkshire pudding for a minimum of six people, chicken with bread sauce for a minimum of four - which have to be ordered 24 hours in advance. It is a menu which wants to be all things and which, I think, has it in itself to succeed.
Of course, this comes down not to concept but to execution and here they score highly. A rarely seen, but hugely welcome, starter of devilled kidneys on toast delivered lots of the still-soft offal in a dense, dark sauce spiky with cayenne. At the other end of the scale, a tart of roasted onions, sage and Ticklemore cheese showed a very light touch. A similar craftsmanship was displayed in the pie of the day for £9, in this case mutton, an ingredient we don't see enough of. The filling was dense and rich and the casing light and flaky. We also tried some terrifically crisp seasonal greens and - praise be! - some crispy, duck-fat roasted potatoes which made the grade.
My companion's main course was frankly an embarrassment, not to Canteen but to me. She admitted she actually wanted one of the sharing dishes but we couldn't have those. She didn't want fish because she'd had too much recently. It was too cold a night for the chicken and walnut salad and she was trying to avoid carbs which meant no to the macaroni cheese. I wouldn't let her have the steak because she would have ordered it well done, and I was determined to defend the cow. That left us looking at just one dish. I told her she couldn't have the pork belly, because it has appeared in this column almost as often as Jordan's assets have been in the Sun. She pouted. Grudgingly, I relented. It was, for the record, very good indeed, and a generous portion for £9.
The only weak point was pudding. The cream in my lemon syllabub had been over-whipped, giving it an unappealing shaving-foam consistency, though the accompanying shortbread biscuits were crisp. The apple crumble was just unbalanced, with too much loose, under-sweetened crumble and not quite enough fruit. That said, there are also things like treacle tart or rice pudding on the menu, which I suspect they would do very well. And trying them gives me just the excuse I need to go back. The truth is this place doesn't need a mission statement. At Canteen the food speaks for itself.
