28-30 Rivington Street, London EC2 (020 7729 7053)
Meal for two, including wine and service, £90
I was miserable. I was standing in front of a new restaurant, the one I was meant to be reviewing, and just the look of the place made me glum. It reminded me of a Labour cabinet minister - modern, sleek, charmless. Behind me the traffic thrummed past and, for a moment, I considered throwing myself into it. Oh all right. I didn't really, but still, I was certain I didn't want to eat here. The menu read like the contents of a Ready, Steady, Cook shopping bag, only with none of the culinary intelligence. It was food for people with no taste.
I understood why I had decided to review it. The restaurant is in Hoxton, a part of east London which sprouts restaurants like adolescents develop pustules. The area, all funky galleries and lounge bars, stinks of modernity and, as a journalist, I am meant to be interested in the modern. But I wasn't, not today, and not if it looked like this. To cheer myself up, while I waited for my companion, I went round the corner to the Rivington Grill, just to read the menu.
I have never eaten at the Rivington but many people I like have and they swear by it. Standing now staring at the list I could see why. It has a section called 'On Toast': devilled kidneys or smoked anchovies, wild mushrooms with garlic butter or potted shrimps. Who could argue with that? They serve Blackface mutton pie and home-made fish fingers with mushy peas, and lobster and chips. The latter, a familiar dish from the Ivy, was not a surprise.
The Rivington was set up by Mark Hix, the executive chef for Caprice Holdings, the group that owns the Ivy. Hilariously, in its early days, Hix would quietly invite journalists to try the Rivington while also asking them not to mention his involvement because his employers at Caprice Holdings didn't know he was moonlighting. Happily the need for subterfuge has passed: not long ago the company bought the Rivington.
Standing there, looking into this comfortably unadorned dining room - wood bar, white walls, chunky tables, no attempt at modernity or sleekness - I realised this was where I wanted to be eating. And then it struck me: this was where I should be eating. You don't want to read me whinging on about clumsy waiters serving stupid food. You want me to be happy. I know you do. So I cancelled the original booking and we went to the Rivington, and I'm glad we did.
The culinary credo here is easily understood: it's lack of adornment. If it's part of the dish it's there for a reason. They don't garnish. They don't present. They plate. So I had those devilled kidneys, in a deep, sticky meaty sauce which was sweet and salty and spicy all at the same time and which provided a solid platform for the offal tang. They sat lined up, on a long oval of toast, in the middle of a white expanse of plate, like passengers on a boat sailing for shore. They never got there. I ate them. We tried a green herb salad, full of leaves so baby they hadn't even teethed, with the farmyard punch of goats' cheese and the crunch of walnuts. We had soft suckling pig with crisp crackling and apple sauce, and a roast red-leg partridge presented whole, with spears of honey-roast parsnips and a landslide of thick, clove-rich bread sauce.
Only after all this did I notice, scribbled up on the blackboard, the words 'Black Country Pork Scratchings'. Readers with stamina may recall that I have long had a bad relationship with the food offerings of the Black Country. Its one redeeming contribution to the British larder is the pork scratching, a fine and entirely indefensible snack item. Fat. Salt. Crisp pig skin. Wave one of those at Gillian McKeith and she'll be done for like a vampire at the sign of the cross. Better still, bang one through her heart.
So I had a bowl of those before pudding, and imagined the old bag scowling over my shoulder, which added to the pleasure. Then a sundae glass full of hokey-pokey ice cream - vanilla mined with soft honey comb - and an apple crumble with blueberries rather than the advertised blackberries, but good for all that, with an admirable custard.
Prices at the Rivington are not low, but they are fair - starters around £6.50, mains a little over double that - because the price reflects the quality of the ingredients. The wine list is short and well priced, they serve breakfast from 8am and, by prior arrangement, will even arrange a banquet for eight people or more, of game birds or lobster and shellfish, of suckling pig or mutton and turnip pie. It is an eating house with many uses. And that lunchtime I used it to restore my faith in restaurants.
