18-20 St John's Street, London EC1 (020 7336 6099). Meal for two, including wine and service: £40
I do sometimes wish that life was like a 1970s television set. Back then if the image went fuzzy all you had to do was bang it very hard on the side. Sharpness, the image you were looking for, would be restored. No one – or at least no one I knew – understood why this worked, but it did. And so on days when everything is out of whack, when my life is so very almost but not quite, I do hanker after the ability to give it a big old bash so that everything re-aligns and functions as I know it could.
I feel that way about the food at the Longroom pub in Farringdon, which in all regards is a noble venture. There have been endless, generally tedious arguments over what a pub serving food should or should not be. This place, a wide echoey space with high bar tables which looks like it was carved out of the inside of railway sleepers, certainly makes a strong argument.
They have a serious list of international beers and ciders with mellifluous names like Yakima Red, Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout and Orchard Pig Charmer, offered in many and various measures. They know their beers and they want you to know them, too. Even though there is an equally interesting wine list, I actually drank one of the beers. It was a weiss something that smelt lightly of a carpenter's tool box, without being anywhere near as heavy.
The narrow food offering is in the service of that beer drinking, in that it's a bunch of big, male, fatty, salty things. There is, behind the bar, a jar of pork scratchings the size of grizzly bear claws. The rest of it comes down to salt beef, which they make on the premises, grilled cheese sandwiches and pickles. At the risk of coming over all Julie Andrews these really are a few of my favourite things. Someone has thought seriously about what food the beer needs. They've focussed on the essentials.
The problem is that the salty things aren't quite fatty enough and the fatty things aren't quite salty enough. It's all very nearly, but not quite, and when the menu is so narrow that's a problem. You really do want to whack the menu on the side so it all comes into focus. For example, the recent surge in people making their own salt beef is a good thing. The problem is that too much, as here, isn't good enough.
Simmer a lump of meat in salty liquor for a while and, unless it has a girdle of fat, it will be as tough and dried out as the face of one of those ageing socialites pictured in Tatler who's still hitting the Botox. What's more it will, as it cools, tense up. Good salt beef needs fat, like hummus needs garlic, like Ant needs Dec, like I need a holiday. If you don't like fat go eat something else. Salt beef is not for you. The salt beef at the Longroom is just too dry and hard and dull. They should be applauded for making their pickles, but these aren't quite brisk and salty enough. A good pickle should make your eyes widen, not your lips pout.
All the sourdough bread comes from Gail's Bakery and is pressed into service in some of the better sandwiches, for example with sparky Lincolnshire poacher, like something that's been forgotten at the back of a cow man's store cupboard, with Serrano ham. But their "craft beer rarebit" is a disaster. First, it is served as a closed sandwich so you get none of the vital bronzed grilled bits and, secondly, it's just not pokey enough. It lacks intent. Against all this a bowl of a hearty-enough vegetable soup is just a little under seasoned.
And so it goes on until you reach their one dessert, a salted caramel tart made with pastry that is all but raw. We leave the entirety of the shell. They do not ask why. All of this sounds glum, but it needn't. For all the things that aren't quite right could be easily sorted. I love the idea of a reliable place for beer, pickles and salt beef. The Longroom pub has the potential to become that.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk. Follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1
