56-58 Tooley Street, London SE1 (020 7403 6388). Meal for two, including wine and service £110
If I had not been required, for professional purposes, to visit Platform, the poison-dipped business end of pitchforks would not have got me beyond the door. On a muggy Thursday evening, the dimly lit downstairs bar was heaving with a restless, reckless kinetic energy; the boozed-up, spirit-slicked office throng collaborating on a prescription for the morning-after pill. It was a Yates wine lodge, without the glamour, a Wetherspoon, without the grace, my idea of hell on earth.
I was disappointed because, from both its web presence, and its exterior, I had been taken by the rail-terminus iconography of the place, which draws on its location close to London Bridge station. As a teenager travelling across Europe I became besotted by major train stations, and eating in them: the way Munich terminus was a city within a city. You could spend entire days there, moving from cinema to restaurant, to showers and then the night train to somewhere else. There was the famed brasserie at Gare du Nord in Paris, where people met each other for cluttered fruit de mer, assignations arranged while each was on the way to somewhere else. And then there was the steamy platform cafe at Ventimiglia on the French-Italian border, where the temperature changed from Gallic to Latin.
And what do we get? At Platform we get a Friday night out in Guildford by way of Hieronymus Bosch. Still, I had a job to do so I made it upstairs to the restaurant where the signs were still not good. Noise rose from below like effluent from a blocked toilet and the light was so dim the waitress had to check the reservation book with a torch. But – and it's a huge BUT of the sort to be illuminated by monks – when I got to the table and looked at the menu, everything perked up. Platform cannot do desserts; it's not worth wasting words on them. What it can do is meat. As they proudly proclaim the place is co-owned by a farmer who delights in the name of Barney Butterfield. Cue usual menu notes about the pampering of livestock. What matters is that they get the whole animal in and use as much of it as they can.
So there are ham hock terrines and rillettes of Gloucester Old Spot. Best of all were warm slices of confited beef, with the sort of tumescent, just-crisp amber fat to make a cardiologist wince, and sweet dark fibrous meat, served with wild mushrooms and the bitter crunch of watercress. Not far behind was devilled chicken livers, in a dark puddle of powerful cayenne-boosted sauce. It soaked into the thick-crusted bread beautifully.
The grouse – the season has only a little way to go now – was not the best you could get in London. It was a little well-mannered, the gamey flavour a touch understated, but it was not a waste of a great game bird. Punchy gravy, proper game chips, braised cabbage. The only thing missing was the bread sauce. A good one gives a plateful of grouse a bit of bottom. No matter. At £24 a pop it was keenly priced for this season.
A tenner cheaper was my braised lamb belly, the meat cooked until it fell apart on the fork, the skin just starting to crisp up. It was good to see this cut on the menu, better still to see it described so. I have never understood why pigs have bellies, and lambs have breasts. It suggests a peculiar level of anthropomorphism. It can be richer than its piggy cousin, but it is still indulgent – and cheap. Mine came with a stew of lentils and mint and, on the side, a salad of tomatoes and shallots, just the thing to cut through the orgy of animal fat.
There are jokes to be made here about Platform being a destination in itself, rather than the mere beginning of a journey, but I have my pride. Leave it at this: the reason for coming here is all upstairs.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit theguardian.com/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place
