The Garden Café, The Garden Museum, Lambeth Palace Road, London SE1 7LB. (020 7401 8865). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £60-£90
Set into the polished concrete floor of the new café at London’s Garden Museum, hard by Lambeth Palace, is a gravestone. It records the fate of the various wives and daughters of one William Coward of Brixton Place in Lambeth. It includes his first wife Susanna, who died in October of 1798. It’s always good to have reading matter over lunch and here it is. I do so love a good gravestone – it’s the stuff of life and death, one chiselled letter at a time.
This rubbed and pot-marked gravestone, an inheritance from the de-consecrated church which houses the Garden Museum, suits the space. It’s the ancient and the modern, the living and the dead, making an accommodation with each other. That describes the entire redevelopment. The Garden Café occupies a sparkling new glass and beaten-copper pavilion, and is the restaurant London never knew it needed. There really is very little else of note for some distance in any direction.
It’s designed by architects Dow Jones and has recently been added to the museum as part of a £7.5m renovation that opened in May. Clearly, they had a choice. Move the graves elsewhere, or incorporate them into the design. They chose the latter. Fair enough: those of us who live in cities are constantly walking on the bodies of those who have gone before. We just don’t always know it. Certainly, if I were to be buried in a restaurant – “Here lies Rayner, never knowingly underfed” – I could do far worse than end up as part of this floor.
One end of the dining room offers a view over a terrace space for outdoor eating (as soon as the chairs arrive) and to the Thames beyond. To the side is a courtyard, with more mausoleums and a modern planting of ferns by various star gardeners, including Dan Pearson, late of this parish. At the moment this courtyard is missing a trick. It’s crying out to be a small kitchen garden, a source for some of the leaves served inside. Perhaps they’re waiting to see if the whole project will bed in, so to speak.
It really should. Installed in the kitchen are two cooks with CVs that promise good things. Harry Kaufman has worked at St John Bread and Wine and Lyle’s; George Ryle has spent time at Padella and Primeur. If there is a style of cooking that can be defined as London, and increasingly I think there is, it lies in the sum of these various parts. It’s about robust flavours, an ingredient count that rarely goes beyond three, a restrained approach to the global larder, and a diehard conviction that flavour must win out over pretty every time.
All of that is here. Dishes pass us by as we order. There are roughly mashed garden peas piled on snow white goat’s curd, piled in turn on thick slices of sourdough from the Snapery Bakery over in Bermondsey. It has the sort of crunchy but tearable crust modern dentistry was invented for. I say that admiringly. There are pieces of lamb shoulder, braised then seared and served with grilled gem lettuce and a dribble of yogurt.
I am drawn instead to grilled onions with nduja, the soft Calabrian salami, which is as much chilli flake as salty pig. These are two ingredients that have been crying out for each other’s company. The soft, sweet caramel tones of the blackened onions are given heft and power by the nduja. Deep, rust-coloured oniony oil pools on the plate, demanding a moment’s bread dredging. It’s the good kind of brown food. It’s an extremely compelling moment for £7. For a pound more, there is chargrilled quail, desperate to be taken in hand. On the side, there’s a crimson dollop of beetroot borani. The beetroot is roughly puréed with yogurt, walnuts and garlic. The colours are violent. The two flavours make their own case for themselves.
At first I am not convinced the same is true of skate wing with samphire, gooseberries and brown butter. The gooseberries are a right old mouth pucker – sour to the point of shock. But once combined with the fish and the butter something magical happens. One soothes the other. The puddles of sauce withdraw from being too rich. The gooseberries become approachable and friendly, and the fish, pulling away from the cartilage in soft strands, comes right through the middle.
Another main dish of slow cooked beef short rib, with plump clams and new potatoes, manages a similar kind of trick – it’s a louche, umami-rich surf and turf. Does it sound too much? Relax. There is a properly dressed side salad full of the fresh crisp pop of raw peas. Sunlight suffuses the room and there is gentle chatter of people who have somehow managed to not be anywhere else but here on a week day lunch time.
A while back, in a review of the Guinea Grill, I pointed out the huge masculine bias of the clientele. This is the complete reverse. Tables are filled almost entirely with women eating together; the sort of women who have read Jenny Joseph’s I shall Wear Purple less as wistful verse than life manual, and the younger ones who are preparing to do so. I say this admiringly. They look like the sort of women with whom my late mother surrounded her kitchen table. I am happy to be among them. They are the sort of wise people who do not hesitate when the dessert menu comes their way and rightly so, for this kitchen knows its pastry.
There are icing-sugar dusted profiteroles, golden beneath the snowfall, filled with cream and glassy fragments of caramel. On the side is hot chocolate sauce. A Bakewell tart is all about the almond and cherry and the crisp pastry shell. But it is a scoop of lemon curd ice cream that makes us purr. It is that perfect balance of thick cream, punchy citrus, sugar and childlike delight. If that’s the bit you’re after, note that the space opens from 10.30am for coffee and cake.
Currently the wine list is short, as are the opening hours. When the museum shuts at 5.30pm so does the café. While I’m sure it’s a delight for the cooks who doubtless don’t know what to do with a night off, it’s a crying shame for the rest of us. Because this really is one of the loveliest new spaces to open in the capital in a long while, and boasts food to match. The long-deceased Mrs Coward surely deserves our greedy company?
Jay’s news bites
■ Across town, the team behind the always pleasing 10 Greek Street (and 8 Hoxton Square) has taken over the food operation at the Whitechapel Gallery. The Refectory offers a daytime menu: chorizo and potato tortilla, smoked trout with horseradish sandwiches, and almond and marmalade cake (whitechapelgallery.org).
■ Robert Owen Brown, Manchester’s culinary national treasure, is back in the kitchen. Shockingly that kitchen is in Yorkshire, near Hebden Bridge. The Hinchliffe is a country pub which describes itself as “pro muddy walking boats”. On the menu: Owen Brown classics, such as crispy black pudding potato cake, killer roast pork sandwiches and his legendary Vimto trifle (thehinchliffe.co.uk).
■ Latest crowdfunding news: vegetarian burger concept, the Vurger Co, is looking for £180,000 to launch its first restaurant in 2018. Andrew Dargue and Donna Conroy of highly regarded vegetarian restaurant Vanilla Black, are consultants. Search “Vurger” on crowdcube.com.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
