Telephone: 020 7379 8000
Address: 9 Adam Street, London WC2
Lunch for two, including wine and service, £50-£80
In a previous life, the premises at No 9 Adam Street, just off London's Strand, was a members-only club with a deliciously ragged reputation. There was, amid the arched basement rooms, a bar where you could buy cheese sandwiches and pork scratchings. There was also a library full of saggy leather armchairs which, late at night, would be occupied by actors not long off the stages of the West End's theatres.
According to my friend Emma, one of those actors, they would sit in the library getting monumentally pissed and flicking through copies of Spotlight, the directory of actors, pointing at the photographs within and arguing over who they would like to shag, who they would like to marry and who they would like to push off a cliff. Famously, one actress got so drunk there one night that she turned the wrong direction out of the front door and ended up lost amid the back alleys where the rough sleepers bed down for the night. They took pity and shared their dope with her. This actress was, of course, my friend Emma. 'You know it's been a rough night when the homeless are helping you out,' she says now, fondly. Ah, happy days.
The Green Room has gone and, in its place, is another members-only club called Adam Street. It does not sell pork scratchings. It does not have saggy armchairs. It has modernist sofas and an awful lot of very expensive red carpet. Those arched ceilings and walls have been smoothed over with funky, distressed plaster and there are uplighters and downlighters everywhere, spreading intimate pools of light. 'My,' said Emma, as we worked our way through to the dining room. 'It's changed a bit.' Indeed.
Emma, who is currently in a West End play, could have come here before, if she had chosen to. It is customary for all the hip central London members-only clubs to offer free membership to West End actors for the duration of their play's run. Adam Street, which has only been open a few months, extended just such an invitation to the cast of Emma's play - except that instead of offering free membership they wanted to charge a reduced rate. (The full whack is £600 a year, including joining fee, and membership is by invitation only.) 'Actors are freeloaders,' Emma says. 'So we weren't interested.'
As a result, like everybody else, she can only go there between the hours of noon and 2.30pm, when non-members are allowed to use the restaurant. I will admit I find the idea of a members club that deigns to let in the great unwashed, but only at certain times, less than attractive. There's a part of me - the stubborn, overly proud, chippy, morose, sod-the-lot-of-you part - that would prefer them to slam the door in my face and leave it slammed, rather than grant me only occasional glimpses of all that smooth crimson carpet. I would therefore love to be able to rant on about what an overpriced, pointless hyped-up waste of good carpet the place is.
There's only one problem. The food is good. What's more, it can be good value. There is a three-course menu for £17.50 with two choices at each course, and everything on it I tried more than did the business. If both of us had stuck to it, we could have enjoyed a modicum of wine and still got out for around the magic £50-for-two mark. Our bill was a little more because Emma ordered from the carte, which is rather more enthusiastically priced. It may not be such good value, but the quality is still there.
Her starter of a lentil salad with chunks of chorizo and a perfectly poached egg was one of those smart pieces of work which manages both to shout sparky and sophisticated while still being comfort food. I started with a solid chunk of roasted salmon which came with smoky hunks of roasted globe artichoke heart, a savoury butter sauce and a dinky quenelle of sweet mashed beetroot. The ingredients were simple but the execution spot on.
My main course of roast pheasant was as good a piece of bird as I've had in a long time. It had clearly been hung for a while because it was both tender and gamey. It came with a gloriously crisp rasher of bacon, a fruity jus and some entirely unnecessary Brussels sprouts. They were unnecessary, of course, because sprouts are always unnecessary. If I were starving on a desert island and the only edible substance available was Brussels sprouts I'd eat my own feet first. (And I have very, very nasty feet; just ask my chiropodist.)
Weirdly, Emma thinks sprouts are lovely and insisted on eating them for me. Why she wanted to besmirch a grand plate of perfectly pink roast lamb, God only knows. There is, as I've discovered in this job, no accounting for taste; it sometimes makes me wonder why I bother. My pudding, from the set menu, was a very pretty plum and peach tart on a delicate puff pastry base with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Like the other two courses, it represented a serious amount of work for the money. Emma went for nursery food: a huge bowl full of startlingly good orange jelly with ice cream. 'It's like an orange with all the inconvenient stuff done for you,' she said, admiringly. It was reminder of just how good real jelly can be.
And so we wandered happy into a cold winter's afternoon. We were convinced that while we didn't want to be members, we might well return for lunch. Next time we might even drink something from the interesting-looking wine list with lots by the glass. Happily, as we hadn't, Emma left the building entirely sober and so didn't end up sharing a joint and a cardboard box with one of the local residents. Clearly it's not just the club that's cleaned up its act.
Contact Jay Rayner on jay.rayner@observer.co.uk.
