The Other Naughty Piglet, at The Other Palace, 12 Palace Street, London SW1E 5JA (020 7592 0322). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £120
Lined up on the windowsill at the Other Naughty Piglet is a parade of emptied wine bottles. It’s a cute piece of signalling to passing trade on the central London street below. It shouts: “Look up here! Good times are to be had!” Among them, their labels turned brazenly to the room, are a trio of emptied bottles. They are a 1953 Pétrus, a 1959 Haut-Brion and a 1990 La Tâche. Somebody didn’t just have a good time. They had a nose-bleedingly expensive one, too.
That someone is Andrew Lloyd Webber, who lives nearby in Belgravia. Last year he bought the not long opened St James Theatre in Victoria, and changed its name to the Other Palace (presumably to distinguish it from the Victoria Palace around the corner), announcing it would be a home for new musical theatre looking to find its feet. It came with a low-ceilinged first floor restaurant which needed filling.
For a solution he looked south of the Thames, to a place just four minutes’ crawl from my house, on one of Brixton’s more characterful boulevards. The cheerily named Naughty Piglets was set up by Joe Sharratt, a former head chef from Adam Byatt’s Clapham restaurant Trinity, and his wife Margaux Aubry, who used to manage the wine bar Terroirs. It was so close to my house I decided not to review. I love south London, but I like people to think I’ve made an effort. Also I’m a coward. If I hated it, I’d have to walk pass the damn place every other day.
Almost all the reviews were positive. Clearly Lloyd Webber thought likewise. Whatever your view of his contribution to musical theatre – me, I’m jazz hands and big-haired enthusiasm all the way – he knows his food. He once reviewed restaurants for a national newspaper and took it seriously. He wrote with appetite and, on a good day, greed and the sort of knowledge the ability to pay for your own dinner can help you acquire. He likes restaurants. And so: the Other Naughty Piglet at the Other Palace. (To declare an interest: my jazz quartet played the studio at St James last year under different management.)
Lloyd Webber has taste. London is full of slick restaurant operators, relentlessly cloning themselves, oblivious to the degradation of their culinary DNA that occurs with each new iteration; restaurateurs who can turn out something with all the glamour of a new-build faux Georgian mansion in Godalming. Lloyd Webber ignored all that and went hunting along Brixton Water Lane for the curiously idiosyncratic. Sure, there’s an element of nowness to the Other Naughty Piglet: the small plates, the sharing, the gloom and furrowed brow of a natural wine list. (I’ll whinge about that later.) But the cooking is very much itself, a kind of modern British with wallops of umami.
There’s a salad of grilled pear, with crisps of Jerusalem artichoke, crushed toasted hazelnuts, a dribble of honey and, to make you sit up and pay attention, crumbled blue cheese. Sometimes the cleverness is textural. A pile of white crab meat sits atop a heap of white cabbage so finely shredded that you don’t know where crab ends and cabbage begins. The divine is located here in the detail: the crushed peanuts scattered throughout, the smear of peanut paste – not quite a butter – underneath, the splashes of yuzu on top. The flavours come in layers.
A coil of linguine, big on bite and slurp, is topped by an egg yolk cured in soy and mirin until almost jellied. A coating butter sauce is flavoured with a take on that bruiser of a Chinese condiment XO sauce, all dried fish and pungency. The dish has the softness and comfort of a carbonara as the yolk breaks, but a cheery left hook that leaves you reeling back from the plate. A similar trick is played with long-cooked glazed pork belly piled high with finely shredded spring onions. It is the dollop of white miso on the side, scattered with sesame seeds, which makes the dish come alive. Bring one to the other and this really is a plateful of naughty piglet.
But the kitchen’s skill is displayed best in the least flashy dish: a snowy fillet of brill, thick cut and pert, with a tangle of deep green monk’s beard, cylinders of pink fir potato and a butter sauce of silk and caress. So, that’s fish, potatoes and greens. But, oh my. What fish! What potatoes! What greens! Any competent cook can make an impact with flavour bombs like miso. It takes talent to get a result from the simple. If a prospective lover invited you for dinner and cooked this, the deal would be sealed. Maybe that’s just me.
They do the same with their crème caramel. There’s nothing special about it and everything special about it. This is crème caramel made by someone who has nailed the recipe: there’s wobble and dairy and the sweet kiss of molten sugar. Pieces of rhubarb, still with bite, come under clouds of foamy custard; a terrific chocolate mousse is partnered with a blood orange sorbet that alone would have been worth the trip.
And all this to the rhythm of a theatre audience coming and going from the performance down below. The space is nice enough, a lot of dark wood and gleaming copper, with both counter seating and a few snug banquettes. (Lloyd Webber likes the one in the corner above the theatre’s front door, apparently.) The space could become another type of restaurant very easily, and one day it probably will. Pricing is central London sane: most dishes are around £10, with the most expensive at £15.
What undoes this, sadly, is another all “natural” wine list. Margaux Aubry takes it on the chin when I reject a glass of natural Lambrusco for being essence of farm yard and as murky as urban canal water. We hunt for something from the softer end of natural and do find it, but as ever with such a list it’s expensive. Not Pétrus 1953 expensive, but more than I would usually pay. It’s so unnecessary when everything else is so compelling. Then again if you’re planning a big rant about the cost of eating out, save your breath. Because, compared with next week’s review, this one isn’t even trying.
Jay’s news bites
• Catering company Yellow Door, which runs Native, the restaurant at Belfast’s Mac Theatre, takes its job seriously, championing some of Northern Ireland’s cracking produce. The all-day menu includes a pie of 18-hour braised Irish beef, a roasted fillet of hake with a butter bean and chorizo stew, and a seafood chowder. They also serve a killer scone (themaclive.com).
• Mitchells and Butler, the company behind Harvester, has converted its Nottingham outlet into a new brand called Son of Steak. Apparently they want to make steak as accessible as Nando’s has made grilled chicken. The prices – £6.50 for a flat iron – do look keen. Then again this might have something to do with size. That flat iron is 6oz (sonofsteak.co.uk).
• There’s a fortune to be made from pizza, though it helps if you are chief exec of Domino’s UK. Company boss David Wild saw his remuneration quadruple in 2016 to £4.5m including long-term incentive payments. The Mighty Meatys are on him.
Jay Rayner’s new book, The Ten (Food) Commandments, is out now (£6, Penguin). To order a copy for £5.10, go to bookshop.theguardian.com
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
