Magdalen
152 Tooley Street, Borough, London SE1
Tel: (020 7403 1342)
Price: Meal for two, including wine and service, £90
At the end of my dinner at Magdalen I realised I could review my shirt. Here was a nice buttery stain from my starter. And here was a dribble of gravy from my main course. And there another. Oh, and another. It was that sort of main course, and that sort of restaurant.
Physically, Magdalen is located on an unlovely urban thoroughfare just south of the Thames, a short stroll from London Bridge. Emotionally, it is located deep in Fergus Henderson's lap. Henderson is the founding chef at St John in Clerkenwell, which made its name cooking up the slippery inner bits of animals as well as the prime muscle. That spawned the Anchor and Hope in Waterloo, where the head chef here used to work. But even three generations down the line the Henderson/St John characteristics - bold, gutsy cooking, death to prissiness, stuff to gnaw on - is obvious in Magdalen's DNA.
Henderson has been credited with kick-starting a renaissance in British cooking, which he almost did. Yes, he has long been big on native produce with which you could be on first-name terms, and so is Magdalen. The changing menu here has references to Middlewhite pork and Longhorn beef. But British food, though sodden with virtues of its own, never tasted as good as this. Certainly my starter of de-shelled snails in garlic butter with roast bone marrow had far less to say about Hereford, where the snails came from, than it did about Burgundy and Bordeaux, which supplied the recipe. In short, like St John, Magdalen takes solid British things and bangs them about in a French paysanne manner. Adam Platt, the restaurant critic of New York Magazine, christened this sort of malarkey haute barnyard, and I like the phrase so much I would almost certainly claim it as my own, were it not for the fact that Platt is 6ft 5in and would hunt me down and roast my spleen for doing so.
Enough! All of this is a bit like trying to describe the lyricism of a symphony by counting the notes. What matters most is not how the food got to where it is, but how it tastes. And it tastes damn good. I scooped the ripe, garlicky snails on to the accompanying toast and poked out some jewels of marrow from inside the roasted bones, and I was very happy. I very much liked, too, my companion's potted crab, which came in a lovely little earthenware pot, and was spiky with cayenne. But I didn't like it quite as much as my starter. I actually dribbled some of it down my shirt so I could take it home with me.
There were many things I could have chosen from the main courses. It could have been that roast Middlewhite pork, or the smoked haddock with choucroute. It could have been the fish stew with gurnard, scallops and mussels, or the lambs' tongues with white beans. But I knew, from the moment I saw it, that it would actually be the venison and trotter pie, at £30 for two. My companion likes pie, and he very much liked this pie. Beneath a golden pastry shell, with the sort of crunch that only comes from the unembarrassed use of good animal fats, was a fantastic mess of long-braised baby deer, falling apart at the nudge of a spoon, mixed with wobbly shreds of trotter, and a big boys' gravy.
What was most striking about Magdalen was how it had all the bases covered, which speaks heavily of the combined experience of the founders: they have loitered everywhere from the Fat Duck to the Mandarin Oriental to Le Manoir en route to here.
The wine list is particularly smart, with choices not just by the glass but also by the half-bottle carafe. It leans heavily towards France, though obstinately we ended up with a brisk half of an Austrian Riesling at the crab-snail end of the meal, and something chunky from Piedmont for the Venison. Both were around £11.50.
And then dessert: a featherlight lemon cheesecake, the wobbly tip of the wedge bowing coyly towards the plate, alongside a scoop of eye-popping lemon sorbet, and a millefeuille of crisp caramelised puff pastry held together by layers of intense but not overwhelming chocolate mousse.
It occurs to me that I have said nothing about the look of the place, but only, I think, because the greater virtues lie on the plate. For the record, it looks like it was once a pub (though actually it was a Peruvian restaurant). There is a non-bookable dining room and bar downstairs, and upstairs the bookable space, with burgundy walls, glossy floorboards, quirky oversized chandeliers and paper tablecloths. It is elegant. It is attractive. But none of it is as diverting as that venison and trotter pie, which truly was a thing of beauty.
· Jay Rayner's new novel, The Oyster House Siege, is published by Atlantic Books at £10.99. To order a copy for £9.99 with free UK p&p, go to observer.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0885
