The Fountain,
Fortnum & Mason,
181 Piccadilly, London, W1 (0845 602 5694)
Meal for two, including wine and service, £110
Even having eaten a rather nice lunch in the Fountain Restaurant at Fortnum & Mason on London's Piccadilly, I can't for the life of me imagine ever going back. Or why you might go there in the first place unless, like me, you were being paid to do so. It's a casual lunch joint at wallet-torturing dinner prices. Think £10 a starter and £16 a main course - and upwards. Think cheery waiters who aren't entirely sure what they are doing, and so keep trying to bring you menus or take orders even though their colleagues have already done so. Think a room full of well-saddled elders of the tribe, furiously trying to eat their kids' inheritance. It might take a lot of smoked salmon, fishcakes and trifle to burn their way through this lot's sizeable wedge, but damn it all, they are going to have a try.
The only other people in there were neatly turned-out married couples - as in people who are married, though not necessarily to each other. The Fountain Restaurant is the sort of place people who fancy each other go for lunch to find out if they're up for an affair. They can be sure nobody will recognise them; not the waiters, who barely recognise their colleagues and certainly not the other diners. And even if another diner does recognise them, well, memory crumbles with age, doesn't it. The Fountain Restaurant is so very safe in so many ways. And now I'm going to be accused of ageism, but really, this place did make me feel young, which I'm not. We must have been the only table of two with all four of our own hips.
The curious thing is - the tourist nightmare of the ground floor aside - I rather like Fortnum & Mason. It's a silly shop full of expensive things nobody needs, but it sells them with elan, and its recent makeover is sleek and handsome. In the basement is a shiny new food hall where they'll sell you a kilo of beef for £44 and age it for longer than you could possibly want. There's a whole afternoon's entertainment right there just watching people buying ludicrous stuff. Upstairs is a lovely floaty lingerie department, run by encouraging French ladies, which is just what any chap out shopping needs. And throughout are these restaurants, which have also had their own makeover.
Downstairs, for example, is a wine bar with a great selection by the glass culled from their impressive wine shop and plates of food designed by Shaun Hill. And here on the ground floor, with its circular bar and inlaid floor, turquoise walls and artfully distressed mirrors, is the Fountain, with food designed by Nanny. A generous nanny who knows what she's doing and has got her teeth in. Back in the food hall they sell a superb wild salmon given a London cure by Foreman's, and that's exactly what they'll serve you a plate of here for a tenner. It is the real deal: fine smoky slices of a fish that's swum somewhere and come back again. Here a 'twice-baked' goat's cheese souffle isn't just shorthand for something that's been prepped hours ago and reheated when the order came in. It's soft and light and wobbly, and has that slight farmyard tang goat lends anything it touches.
A Barnsley chop is served thick and pink, the fat properly crisped - and you know how important that is to me. Even something as filthy and continental as a duck confit is well executed. There are good chips, and leaves of proper wilted spinach and a cauliflower cheese with a mustardy kick of the sort you eat on a Sunday night when absolutely nothing else will do.
See. I told you. Most of the food is good. (Though a champagne jelly was a dud, with a strange musky flavour and a texture like the bones of a whole cow had been boiled down to set it.) Yet, at the end, for two and a half courses and a glass of wine each, you - by which I mean we - are left staring at a bill north of £90 and wondering what we did to deserve it. And why we chose to have lunch with this strange group of people in this atmosphere-free room run by waiters who would rather be somewhere else and who, deep inside their heads, probably are. The best you can say about the Fountain is that it's proof that London's restaurant sector has improved to such a degree that even the bad places are now capable of serving good food. Which is bizarre. Much like the Fountain.
