Native, 3 Neal’s Yard, London WC2 (020 3638 8214). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £80
Native is a sweet little restaurant with an irritating mission statement attached. Its shtick: wild foods. That’s foraged foods, that can only be obtained courtesy of a hearty commitment to Wellington boots and mud. It’s anything that isn’t available off the shelf. This is both based on a false premise and offers a false promise.
The latter I’ll deal with quickly. On a menu of four starters and four mains, significant numbers of the ingredients – pig’s trotters and cauliflower, Lincolnshire Poacher cheese and chick peas, eggs and cabbage – aren’t wild at all. Unless somebody has started foraging wild cauliflower and located naturally occurring outbreaks of self-fermenting cheese, made from the outpourings of self-milking wild cows. Which I doubt. What’s more, many of the other ingredients which might have been foraged or shot in the wild, can be farmed, such as pears, venison, pheasant and clams.
The far more important false premise is the notion there is an inherent virtue in these wild foods. For a start if the idea behind Native is such a good one, presumably all restaurants ought to be sourcing ingredients this way. In which case the impact on the ecosystem would be disastrous. The landscape would be overrun by sweaty types in cable-knit sweaters wrestling each other for the last clump of wild garlic. Already cack-handed foragers are doing damage to Britain’s woodlands in pursuit of mushrooms. Imagine what would happen if that was scaled up.
It’s also based on a belief that farming is somehow an inauthentic way to gather our food. What utter, dribbling, incoherent tosh. Farming is what made us who we are today. Without the benefits of scale enabled by the mass production of crops we would never have had time to build civilisations; to indulge our artistic impulses to create literature and music and iPhones. We would not be us. Yes, of course there are bad examples of modern farming. There are methods which damage the environment. That doesn’t make farming in general a bad idea. Arguing otherwise would be like pointing to a badly run hospital and declaring that all hospitals ought to be scrapped immediately. We are not less human for having abandoned scrabbling in the mud for our lunch, in favour of civilisation and culture. We are more human.
Naturally the website reads like some random, hug-a-tree, squeeze-a-ferret, grease-an-otter slogan generator. We learn that Ivan, the chef, has a “passion for natural, foraged and seasonal British produce” and that “hunter-gathering is in Imogen’s blood”. In the sense that I am descended from early man, it’s in mine, too. I am full to the brim with hunter-gatherer. I just don’t like to boast about it, because I think my ability to get my dinner from Ocado is way cooler.
Anyway the huge saving grace is that Ivan can cook, and that this white-washed restaurant tucked away in Neal’s Yard in the centre of Covent Garden has a sweet, gentle air about it. It’s very much at odds with some of the bombast and clatter of recent testosterone-drenched openings. Our waitress bubbles enthusiastically about how the owners’ parents have been down, nailing the tables together to get the place open in time. There’s a bouquet of flowers in the loo, still in its Interflora wrapping. This is very much a new baby.
And prices are keen, or keen within the topsy-turvy world of London restaurants. For the food, three courses will work out around £25 a head and the short wine list – just three whites and reds – doesn’t go beyond £28 a bottle.
A broth of tiny palourde clams, like the pebbles on Chesil Beach closest to the surf, bobs with meaty pieces of pheasant and pig’s trotter, the whole given punch and kick by the liberal application of wild garlic. It manages to be both forest and shore in one bowl.
By contrast, flat bread is spread with the vivid pink of hummus whipped up with a beetroot purée, some pickled cabbage and harissa, and then topped with visceral pink slices of roasted wood pigeon. It is a slap of exotica. They call it a wood pigeon kebab and in the sense that you could roll it up and eat it with your hands if pushed, I get the gag. But this is Covent Garden so we despatch it with a knife and fork. A non-meat starter of pickled pear and slices of salty Lincolnshire Poacher cheese manages to be much bigger and bolder than the sum of its parts.
The most expensive main course, at £13.50, is a piece of expertly cooked hake laid over a raucous split-pea dal, alongside what they call cauliflower pakora. Is it a dal? Are they pakora? Not really, but that doesn’t matter. The combination of the mashed peas with their butch spicing and the crisp cauliflower fritters does the job. Venison turns up three times, out of the eight dishes, so much so that in a starter it’s listed as “fallow tagine”.
There’s also a venison steak and a venison hash with a fried “hen’s egg”. (Usual question: was said egg ever likely to have come from a cockerel?) The latter is the least successful of the mains – not because it was especially bad, but because once you give any meat the hash treatment – long cook it, mix it with potato, fry it up – it’s almost impossible to be sure what animal it came from. It could have been beef. It could have been lamb. It feels like a jump to leftovers, having bypassed the original dish.
And that’s where the menu sputters to a halt. Dessert is not so much an afterthought as missing in action. The nearest is a puddle of passable custard with stewed rhubarb and shards of what’s listed as coriander honeycomb that doesn’t taste of coriander. The only other option is more Lincolnshire Poacher with crispbreads and more rhubarb. They get top marks for re-using their own ingredients enthusiastically within the same menu.
So they need to get some desserts. Obviously, for my tastes they could also scrap the mission statement, partly because it’s bollocks but mostly because the vast majority of the cooking is so assured they don’t need it. As ever what really matters is what’s on the plate, and here at Native that makes the best argument for itself.
Jay’s news bites
■ The Pipe and Glass pub in Dalton, East Yorkshire, gets a lot of attention and rightly so. James Mackenzie’s cooking is gutsy stuff which reflects the landscape in which it sits. Go for the likes of potted pork with apple and crackling salad, shoulder of lamb with mutton and kidney faggots, and ginger burnt cream with rhubarb. It ain’t cheap, but it is good (pipeandglass.co.uk).
■ Heartily sick of seeing macaroni cheese on menus? It’s understandable. According to the menu trends report from analysts Horizons, which studies the menus of 121 pub, restaurant and hotel brands, listings for mac ’n’ cheese are up 550%. Meat-free dishes have risen from 23% of dishes to 27%.
■ Former OFM young chef of the year Paul Foster has stepped down from his position at Mallory Court to raise £100,000 through crowd funding for his own restaurant. It will, he says, be ‘fine dining with a relaxed atmosphere’. Pledge a tenner and he’ll send you a box of chocolates. Search for Paul Foster on kickstarter.com.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
• This article was amended on 6 March 2016. In the penultimate paragraph of the review, it should have said stewed rhubarb rather than rosemary. This has been corrected.
