Great Queen Street
32 Great Queen Street, London WC2
Tel: 020 7242 0622
Meal for two including wine and service: £80
Most evenings, standing outside the Indian restaurants that line Great Queen Street in London's Covent Garden, you will see smartly dressed men watching the pedestrians pass by. It would be easy to mistake them for bouncers employed to throw out difficult punters. In fact they are there to throw potential punters in. If you hesitate but for a moment outside one of these places, one of these guys will be on you in a second, begging you to step inside.
Advertising billboards with a pulse are not the only ploy these restaurants use. There are sandwich boards festooned with the names of awards they have won, and the windows are papered in glowing endorsements from guidebooks you may or may not have heard of. I have no idea what these restaurants are like. They may well be great. But all they do through their eagerness is display a massive lack of self-confidence.
Recently a new restaurant opened on Great Queen Street which is the polar opposite of its neighbours. It is swilling in self-confidence. I don't even recall seeing the name on the glossy dark-painted frontage. So here's what you need to know: Great Queen Street is at 32 Great Queen Street. You'll find it between 31 and 33 (the numbers run sequentially). In the window is a simple menu carrying the day's date. Inside, the walls are painted deep burgundy. There are rough-hewn tables and a long bar where you can both eat and drink. It is handsome in a very utilitarian way. I believe John Reid would call it fit for purpose. I'll just call it nice.
There are grounds for self-confidence here. Great Queen Street is the offspring of the Anchor & Hope, a gutsy gastropub down in Waterloo which does lots of hearty things with slow-roasted meats and offally bits, and the menu here is similarly minded. That will not be surprising to those who have come across the food writing of chef Tom Norrington-Davies, who couldn't do prissy if his life depended on it.
At which point this review should turn into a hymn of praise, and in a way it is. This is a solid restaurant with a real identity of its own, serving the sort of food central London needs at a fair price. What's more, unlike at the Anchor & Hope, you can actually book. Hurrah! And I'm always going to be well disposed to a menu that lists things like new season's garlic soup, bacon with green sauce, and, most enticingly, a seven-hour roasted shoulder of Hereford lamb 'for five-ish', priced at £62.50. The problem is that our meal didn't eat quite as well as that menu reads. I liked my warm salad of snails with crispy shards of bacon and lots of brisk new leaves. And puddings - a nutmeg-boosted custard tart and a buttermilk pudding with rhubarb compote - were beyond reproach.
Other things were less good. The serving of asparagus for £6 was, frankly, mean, and the mains were lacklustre. I admired the seasonality of the braised peas and morels with pot-roast chicken, but for £12.80 the cut was on the small side and a little dry. My slices of roast leg of Hereford lamb were clearly from a fine, sturdy animal, but of the anchovy sauce - one of the reasons I ordered it - I could see nothing.
And yet Great Queen Street has impeccable pedigree. One of the founders, Michael Belben, was also the founder of the Eagle in Farringdon, the original London gastropub. He knows his stuff. So I'm going to give it the benefit of the doubt. I certainly think it unlikely they will be employing someone to throw unsuspecting pedestrians into the dining room any day soon.
