The Spotted Pig, 314 West 11th Street, New York (00 1 212 620 0393). Meal for two, including wine and service, £80
How to create a modern, urban gastro-pub. Step one: first take your scuzzy pub; your broken down, sticky carpeted, fag-burnt old boozer which last saw better days around the same time as George Best's liver. Because, however negotiable the gastro element may be, the pub bit isn't. If it ain't in a pub then it isn't a gastro-pub. Logical? I think so or, at least, I thought so. It is why, up to now, gastro-pubs have been a purely British phenomenon. Oh sure, lots of other countries have places they refer to as pubs, but none of them actually are, particularly those in America. See the word pub on the outside of a building in the US and what you'll be looking at is the worst kind of plasticated fakery this side of Jordan's breasts.
Which was why I was deeply suspicious of the Spotted Pig, a recently opened 'British gastro-pub' in the heart of Greenwich Village. You couldn't get a good pint in that city if Paris Hilton's life depended upon it and, true to form, the site the venture operates from was not previously a pub at all, but a French restaurant called Le Zoo, which has been given a hefty make-over. It's a tight, low-ceilinged corner of a place, made tighter still by the crowds of see-and-be-seen people who crowd in here undaunted by the waits for unbookable tables that easily crest the hour within a few minutes of opening.
No matter: there is a heavy dark-wood bar to be crushed against and lots of porcine illustrations on the wall to look at, and the warming sense that this is the place to be in New York right now. It is part-owned by the superstar American-Italian chef Mario Batali, who has more fists in more restaurant pies than almost anybody else in town right now, which partly accounts for that must-have stamp. But is it a gastro-pub? The chef, April Bloomfield, does at least have British credentials, having worked at Bibendum, Kensington Place and, most importantly, the River Cafe in London, the influence of which shows most on the menu. It has a distinct southern Mediterranean feel. The cheese in a starter of buffalo mozzarella with bruschetta of stewed peppers, for example, was not the ice-hockey puck of white rubber we get too often here, but the milky, textured, grass-sweet creature it should be. A salad of green beans and rocket with a mustard dressing and a perfectly executed soft-boiled duck's egg, was an equally unshowy and satisfying piece of assemblage.
The same simple virtues were present in my companion's main course of chargrilled monkfish. It was a fresh slab of fish, sensitively cooked and served with a mixture of roast aubergine and cherry tomatoes which were, as they say about those parts, 'deeply simpatico'. It was when I got to my thick chargrilled burger, served on a crisp bun with a slab of Roquefort on top and a side of shoestring potatoes, mixed with shards of crisp, fried garlic and rosemary, that it occurred to me: I had to stop sneering. It didn't matter what the building had once been. This menu, with its confident eclecticism, its generous devil-may-care approach to plating and delivery, was exactly what you would expect to find in a British gastro-pub.
Of course, there are some food pubs here which have a distinct character. The original gastro-pub, the Eagle in Farringdon, still cleaves very closely to its Iberian roots. The more recent Anchor & Hope near Waterloo has a big-fisted liver and lights feel about it, broadly reminiscent of St John.
But as for the rest of them, they are (mostly) what the Spotted Pig is: an exercise in casual dining which strips away the self-conscious flummery and artifice that attends so many big restaurant experiences. They give you a list of food. They cook it for you and bring it to your table. You pay and go home fed. Hell, the experience was so authentically British gastro-pub that our waiter was an Australian, as they almost always are here. And naturally, this being a gastro-pub, we didn't feel the need to drink beer (though, for the record they had Beamish Stout and their own Spotted Pig, brewed for them in Brooklyn). They had a great list of inexpensive wines, from which we drank a hefty (and cheap) Californian Sauvignon with some funky name like Rabbit Jump or Running Rabbit or Pissed Bunny. Pricing was also spot on: around £7 for a starter and £10 to £12 for a main course. My, but the exchange rate is so in our favour right now.
In Britain, where two of anything is a trend, three is a craze and four a frightful bore, there is a tendency to decry the gastro-pub as a fashion that has had its day; a movement that has, in its own way, become as formulaic and tawdry as what went before. This is cobblers. The latest adventures in molecular gastronomy may be intriguing to a culinary trainspotter like me. The critics may swoon or swear over the latest offerings from Gordon Ramsay or Tom Aikens, the £100-a-head dinners with their parades of courses and freebies from the chef which are nothing of the sort, but the real battle for the culinary heart of Britain is being fought in places like the gastro-pubs, which make the eating of good, affordable food outside the home a habit rather than a treat. The weird thing about this is that it took me a trip to New York and the Spotted Pig to realise it.
