Roth Bar & Grill, Bruton, Somerset BA10 0NL (01749 814 700). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £100
There are some restaurants which, given all the other things they have going for them, offer food that’s better than it needs to be. The view from Duck and Waffle on the 40th floor of London’s Heron Tower is so vast, and the sense of floating in a glass box above the quartz and steel city so engrossing, that the wit of Dan Doherty’s cooking merely feels like a bonus. A brown paper bag of his crispy pig’s ears and the opportunity to look down upon the rest of you, and my life is complete.
At Bob Bob Ricard in Soho they have a button to be pressed in case of champagne emergencies; ie when you’ve run out. Life should always come with a champagne button. They bring individual toasters to the table for breakfast and monogram the butter. The room looks like an Edwardian train carriage, an embarrassment of deep varnished wood, polished brass and ornate downlighter. The fact you can also eat really well here feels like overkill.
On a hot summer’s day, when the curve and dip of rural England shimmers green and yellow beneath a topaz sky, the Roth Bar & Grill in Bruton in Somerset is much the same. The whole proposition is so damn civilised that the quality of the cooking is an extra. The site, part of a working farm, is a pastoral English outpost of the international art gallerists Hauser & Wirth. Wander towards the loos and you’ll find yourself on the threshold of a series of vaulting galleried spaces that drift one into the other, displaying vivid works you can’t afford. Behind those is an extraordinary garden, created by Piet Oudolf, a proper walk via gravel paths and grassy mounds through a planting of grasses and wild flowers that sway and rustle in the breeze.
The bar and restaurant, with its outside terrace, were designed by Björn and Oddur Roth, son and grandson of the artist Dieter Roth. They are an installation in their own right: the bar is a gathering of objects lost, found or otherwise redundant, housed under a ceiling of hefty wooden beams, and walls of rough stone. The place where gallery and restaurant meet is marked by a carefully lit meat hanging cabinet of glass, its back wall made of bricks of pink Himalayan salt. Triangular hind quarters of cattle hang here, looking like escapees from an unsettling painting by Francis Bacon (though to be fair, did Bacon ever paint anything else?). The beef, lamb and pork mostly comes from the farm. Those glass walls are emblazoned with the slogan “This is not an art work”, which, of course, immediately turns it into one.
As I say, with all this going on, they could probably have phoned in the menu and few would have complained or, frankly, noticed. Instead, the food served at the restaurant, run by chef Steve Horrell, formerly of Babington House, is as robust and sturdy as the landscape of which it is a part. It’s also as international as the contemporary art they display.
Their own merguez sausages are made from serious pieces of roughly chopped aged beef that, despite the assault by North African spicing, still taste very much of themselves. They come grilled until the skins burst beneath your teeth, and layered over a stew of white beans, smashed up to allow both the rough and the smooth their voice. Everything is lubricated with dollops of fiery harissa, the dark red of warning.
Drawing on the coast, just over an hour away to the south, there is spaghetti spun through with white crab meat, lots of red chilli, fresh tomatoes for ballast, and aniseed courtesy of a sprinkling of roasted fennel seeds. It is light rather than pasta heavy. It is all about the crab.
A whole plaice is grilled to that point where the blade of a knife slipped in over the spine will separate out the buttery, golden-skinned fillets with a nudge. It comes with borlotti beans and a powerful dressing thick with rosemary and, more importantly, lots of chopped salted anchovy. (I have a habit of attempting to add chopped anchovy to most things at home; my family resists. I’m wasted on them.)
There is, naturally enough, a section of the menu dedicated to the superstar contents of that hanging cabinet, which changes depending on what’s recently been slaughtered. Beef-wise, it alternates between an Aberdeen Angus-Wagyu cross and a pure Hereford. I ignore both and have what they insist upon calling a double lamb chop and those of us with a taste for the old names will call a Barnsley chop. Only one thing matters with a Barnsley chop: has the fat been properly rendered and crisped? Here, it has. It comes on a rough, boisterous stew of spiced aubergine, full of deep caramel smoky notes with a hit of fire at the end. There is a different kind of caramel, salted and sticky and as rich as an international art dealer, in a milk chocolate pot with peanut brittle. A lemon tart has a zingy filling and a crisp pastry base. A dollop of crème fraîche sends it on its way.
It feels like good value, though only compared to fancy London prices: it’s £8 for the merguez sausages, £12 for the crab-meat-heavy spaghetti. The plaice is £14 and the lamb chop, £16. Perhaps add in a glass of Nyetimber, frosting the glass with its chill, and watch the bill mount up, in a way which is also reminiscent of the capital. None of this will disturb the regulars. You need only clock the punters on a hot summer’s afternoon to recognise that this terrace is populated by an especially moneyed and tasteful version of rural England; one versed in the aesthetics of stone flags in the kitchens, William Morris on the bedspreads and Farrow & Ball on the walls.
Currently they are open for dinner only on Fridays and Saturdays, but serve breakfast, lunch and tea throughout the week, which speaks volumes for the clientele: there are enough of them to keep a restaurant in business almost entirely on daytime trade. I find myself wondering who they are. How can they slack off by daylight to sit here in the sunlight, staring up at the massive 20ft sculpture of a chrome pail, overflowing with a froth of smaller pails, and eating well? I mean, I have an excuse. But them? Ah well… stifle the envy. At least they’ve made a good choice.
Jay’s news bites
For more good food with a nice gallery attached try the Rex Whistler restaurant at Tate Britain, in London’s Pimlico. It comes with a renowned wine list and Whistler’s witty mural The Expedition In Pursuit of Rare Meats, painted in the 1920s. The menu, served at lunch only, is £35.95 for three courses. It includes crab with poached peach, lamb with lettuce and bacon, and buttermilk and orange blossom panna cotta (tate.org.uk).
Following the purchase in 2014 of Pizza Express by Hony Capital, one of China’s largest private equity firms, the company is to launch its Chinese food chain, Beijing Hehegu, in the UK. “When we were working on the takeover of Pizza Express in Britain, we struggled to find a nice Chinese restaurant at the time,” Bruce Wang of Hony told Reuters. Given the explosion in regional Chinese restaurants here, I wonder where they ate.
Jacob Kenedy has finally closed Vico, his casual trattoria in London’s Cambridge Circus. He is concentrating on Bocca di Lupo and his Cajun and Creole food pub, Plaquemine Lock.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
