Farm Girl Café, 9 Park Walk, London SW10 0AJ (020 3674 7359). Meal for two, including drinks and service £110
The menu at the Farm Girl Café features lots of initials. There’s V for Vegan. There’s GF for Gluten Free. There’s DF for Dairy Free. I think they’re missing a few. There should be TF for Taste Free and JF for Joy Free and AAHYWEH for Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here. If you examine the company’s website, and I would only advise doing so if you have strong teeth that can cope with a good grinding, you will learn that the Farm Girl group offers: “A holistic and healthy yet comfortingly simple approach to Australian Café culture.” Nope, me neither. Apparently, they like to use “nutritionally nurturing ingredients”, which sounds rather nice. I could have done with a bit of nurture, rather than the dishes that came our way.
I have nothing against eating healthily. I have only one body and I try to look after it. My mother used to say that she hoped to die aged 98, shot dead by a jealous lover. She didn’t quite manage it, but it’s an ambition I’m happy to inherit. The menu here is omnivorous with a heavy emphasis on non-meat cookery, which is a fine thing. I like vegetables, me. They can taste really nice. But this sort of cooking does have to be done with skill, grace and, ideally, an absence of malice.
The Farm Girl Café, Chelsea, is the third in a group which until now has stuck to charcoal or matcha lattes, and light lunches involving an awful lot of almond butter, avocado and something called coconut bacon, which you just know isn’t. This is the first to serve dinner, and it does indeed look like a proper restaurant in a very Chelsea sort of way. There’s a giant blue Welsh dresser behind the bar, faux wooden beams across the ceiling and banquettes in a field shade of green. It’s like a cartoon version of a farmhouse as imagined by someone who hasn’t been in one.
It fills quickly on a cold winter’s evening, with blonde-tressed Chelsea women just bubbling with intolerances. They are fizzing with them, these dairy- and gluten-fearing dietary warriors, seeking sanctuary from the terrifying world of modern food. With them are their pink-cheeked, anxious-looking boyfriends, who clearly fear they are just one more rugby club, traffic-cone-on-your-head piss-up away from being chucked. A woman arrives clutching her Yorkshire terrier. They are given a corner table. The dog is offered a bowl of water and a plate of food and disappears on to the floor for dinner. At least somebody gets to eat well.
From the small plates we order the whole (completely out-of-season) globe artichoke, which apparently is gluten free. It’s tough to see how it would be anything other. It has been prepared by someone who either hates globe artichokes or has never met one before: boiled until it is as soft and rank as Grandma’s cabbage, only with none of the glamour. It is just so much mushy leaf matter, and smells of a long Sunday afternoon in someone’s overheated suburban front room. The damn thing could be disposed of without the aid of teeth or, better still, using a composter. That would remove the middle man, which in this case happens to be me.
“Paola’s Market Veggies” arrive in a bowl, with a grainy, deathly “carrot hummus” thickly smeared up the side, like someone had an intimate accident and decided to close the loo door and run away. At the bottom is a “cashew aioli”, which is the kind of discharge you get when you torture nuts. It tastes of raw garlic and nothing else. There are sticks of celery and hunks of cauliflower to dredge through this, alongside “seeded crisp bread” which is neither of the last two words. It is dense and hard and tasteless, as you imagine cork floor tiling might be, if it had somehow been repurposed as food.
Finally, from the small plates, comes tostadas piled with jackfruit, the latest hip, unconvincing replacement for meat. It is a fibrous tangle that gets stuck in your teeth on top of a violent, acidic sludge of guacamole. The jackfruit is described as being barbecued. This means it has been smeared with a blunt barbecue sauce of the kind they serve at pubs with a flat roof. Each of these dishes costs about £8. After this vegan calamity, this extraordinary display of dismal cooking, I find myself eyeing the Yorkshire terrier, greedily. Just hand him over, give me access to the grill, and five minutes.
Perhaps the kitchen can do better with something that once had a pulse. Or perhaps not. The crispy turkey schnitzel sounds nice. Apparently, it is encased in “lemon and thyme-infused breadcrumbs”, but tastes of neither of those things. It barely tastes of anything at all. The meat is overcooked and has the texture of something Timpson’s might one day think about using to re-sole my brogues. A heap of pickled cucumber and radish is piled on top helpfully, to ensure the breadcrumbs go soggy. A side dish of roasted cauliflower is so undercooked that the knife barely manages to go through it. The one edible dish is a glutinous, cloyingly sweet vegetable “curry”. It would be regarded as an utter, shameful travesty by many in south-east Asia, but it’s not actively unpleasant.
We do not stay for dessert, because we have suffered enough. In any case they are mostly a list of ice creams and sorbets including a “spinach, kiwi and coconut oil gelato”, which sounds terrifying. What we’ve ordered so far, plus the second-cheapest bottle of wine, has already run up a bill of just under £100. It’s not just the dismal cooking that pains me here. It’s the squandering of ingredients and of people’s time and the tiresome narrative of “wellness” with which it’s been flogged. I feel especially bad about our waiter. Tom is a good man. He is charming, on point and utterly wasted here; he should do something more socially useful, like fly tipping or nicking cars. I whip out my phone and discover there is a branch of Honest Burgers nearby. One of their finest, served medium rare, a big heap of rosemary and salt chips and a hefty tumbler of cheap and cheerful sauvignon blanc is exactly what we need to make all those BTGW (Bad Thoughts Go Away).
News bites
The elegant glass box that houses the café at the Garden Museum, just south of Lambeth Bridge, gives equal billing to both meat and veg, but does so with grace and good taste. A recent menu started with winter tomatoes with tropea onions, or cockles with bacon, followed by gnocchi with wild garlic and almonds or oxtail and lentils. Stay for dessert (gardenmuseum.org.uk).
There’s nothing clever about stupid high prices for food items, but it’s always good to have something to gawp at. Recently, on a trip round the refurbished Harrods food hall, I spotted Wagyu Kobe fillet A5, imported from Japan, for £62.50 per 100g. Or £625 a kilo. The minimum order is 500g. You do the maths.
Restaurant no-shows have become a serious issue in the industry recently. Two weeks ago, Edinburgh chef Mark Greenaway introduced a deposit scheme after recording 450 no-shows in a month. Now the Casual Dining Group, which own brands such as Bella Italia and La Tasca, is considering introducing advance payments for large groups.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
