108 Garage, 108 Goldborne Road, London W10 5PS (020 8969 3769). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £120
Some restaurant names need to be unpicked. The 108 in this week’s is, quite obviously, the street number, on a stretch of west London’s Goldborne Road, cluttered with bijou décor shops, and more intriguing Moroccan and Portuguese mini-marts. As to “garage” you really have to see the place. If it wasn’t for the furniture you could easily imagine parking the motor in here. The walls are back-to-bare redbrick and the floor is polished concrete. The painted girders are on display and the base of the curving bar is more concrete, this time rough and pockmarked. A shiny, copper-coloured metal bar top adds decorum, undermined a little by the walls of pure corrugated steel further back, enclosing the kitchen.
The effect, courtesy of some bare filament bulbs, is warmer than you might imagine. Even so it doesn’t give the slightest hint of the ambition of the place, and to start with the management didn’t seem keen to let on either. We can debate long and hard the merits or otherwise of the use of public relations companies in the promotion of new restaurant businesses. Whatever your view, they have become an expected part of the restaurant launch circus. Not in the case of 108 Garage. They simply opened the doors and started cooking.
There really has been no pre-publicity, not even on those niche websites that pride themselves on being first. Perhaps the restaurant decided to save the money usually spent on PR. After all, those concrete floors won’t polish themselves. And yet the dribblingly positive reviews, of which this is another, have stacked up. What’s interesting about this is how it unpicks the conventional wisdom that, in a fiercely crowded London market, you need to retain an expensive firm of publicity professionals. They in turn will need to schmooze the mainstream media and pelt Instagram stars with offers of free meals and a quick hose down with the prosecco. Alternatively, you do none of that and just start cooking really good food full of vigour and originality. It is heartening to discover that sometimes, if you build it, they will come. Certainly, deftness and skill like this is worth shouting about loudly and often.
108 Garage is good, in places exceptionally so (with a couple of caveats). The chef is Chris Denney, who trained as a fine artist but got jobs in kitchens to make ends meet. The means to an end became the end in itself. He has worked for Phil Howard, Eric Chavot and Nuno Mendes and spent a year in Italy. Most recently he was head chef at an Italian-accented place in Covent Garden.
There is a touch of the Italian to the menu here, but also a touch of a bunch of other things besides. What defines his food, I think, is a keen understanding of acidity; of the way brisk sharp notes, carefully deployed, can lift a dish if all the other essentials are in place.
First, there is impeccable sourdough, another contender in the increasingly feverish bread wars under way at the moment. A few years back bread was generally just an edible sponge for sauce, rather than something worthy of comment. Now it gets measured on a scale against that available at Bonhams or the Fat Duck. This is right up there. The crust has a giddy snap, the crumb a lightly sour spring. There are whorls of their own sultry taramasalata to dredge it through, easy on the fish, gentle on the smoke, and another of duck liver pâté with a little fruit compote on the top. Both are so soft and velvety you don’t know whether to eat them or sleep on them.
The fireworks explode again with agnolotti – parcels of gossamer pasta the colour of daffodil blooms – enclosing a gloriously savoury ragu of long-braised lamb heart, as if the organ that once kept the animal alive is giving its all once more. There are petals of lightly pickled onion and a transparent, vegetal broth for them both to bathe in. What makes the dish fly is the addition of oil flavoured with mustard or horseradish, which kicks in at the finish. It’s a lot of drama in a bowl for £8. The most expensive starter at £14 is a sweet, tangled pile of snowy crab meat, first poached in butter, then laid under slices of pickled golden turnip, all crunch and eye-widening vibrance.
A sizeable fillet of red mullet is treated sensitively, the iridescent skin flash-fried to crisp. But it is the accompanying tangle of vibrant monk’s beard, the colour of a croquet lawn, which makes the dish. It is spun through with shattered croutons of fried bread and laid on a dollop of romesco sauce, that Spanish condiment of almonds, garlic, paprika and olive oil which could make anything delicious, even Michael Gove. Best dish of the lot is a long-smoked piece of short rib, fondant-fancy pink inside, cooked until the connective tissue has given up the ghost, then piled with a fine dice of dill pickles and a few other good things besides. It tastes like the best pastrami sandwich.
The one fail is a “steak” of under-roasted cauliflower. Raw, tepid cauliflower heart can’t be anybody’s idea of a good time. A sauce flavoured with pecorino doesn’t help. Nor do black truffle shavings at a £10 supplement. I decline them when ordering, but they turn up as an uninvited “gift from the chef” which then has to be paid for. (In the age of the “invited” blogger, and the local newspaper columnist thickly glazed in hospitality, being explicit about these things makes sense, I think.)
The only other disappointment is the lack of an ambitious dessert department. The solution, as in too many places where pastry isn’t a strength, is a bunch of creamy things in a bowl. They are, to be fair, nice creamy things in a bowl. There’s a black sesame ice cream, with leaves of caramelised meringue; another bowl brings a scoop of a chocolate mousse with artichoke ice cream, which is nowhere near as bad an idea as it sounds, the two laid on puffed rice.
Against the genuinely thrilling fireworks of the savoury courses these desserts merely whimper and die. For the moment go elsewhere for cake. But don’t let that detract from the brilliance of the cooking. In a restaurant world full of pre-paid hype and bluster, there is something hugely encouraging about a new place which decides simply to open the doors and let the food speak for itself. Especially when what that food has to say is so damn eloquent.
Jay’s news bites
■ Paradise Garage in London’s Bethnal Green shares more with this week’s restaurant than half a name. Chef Robin Gill’s outpost, tucked into a reconditioned railway arch, has a similar commitment to terrific food served in unstuffy surroundings. Go for a tartare of scorched beef with artichokes, lamb loin with Roscoff onions, bitter leaves and smoked potato gratin (paradise254.com).
■ Further proof, if it were needed, that salmon farming has been grossly ill-managed. A delightful-sounding outbreak of sea lice has resulted in a decimation
of stocks. As a result the price of salmon is expected to rise by as much as 50%.
■ Friends of Ham in Leeds is opening a wine bar-cum-restaurant and wine shop. As well as the familiar charcuterie selection, a cheesemonger will have a concession and there will be a branch of the Local Wine School network. The name: Ham & Friends. See what they did there? It should open in April (friendsofham.com).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
