Bumpkin 209 Westbourne Park Road, London W11 (020 7243 9818)
Meal for two, including wine and service, £90
It is a given that most television cookery programmes are profoundly irritating but one, a BBC show for the under-fives called Big Cook, Little Cook, is more irritating than is strictly necessary. It is not simply that the two actors involved have awful false laughs and are forced, by the producers, to pretend that cleaning up the kitchen is a cause for celebration (which even the most gullible 18-month-old knows is a dirty, filthy adult lie). It is more fundamental than that. First, there is the food they prepare, which bears no resemblance to anything anyone would ever eat: it is all bumble bees made out of sesame seeds and rice paper, or cream cheese mice with whiskers of chives. It isn't cooking. It's sculpture. Sometimes recipes are plain wrong. Their version of fruity ice cream? Mix jam into whipped cream and freeze. What utter cobblers.
Worse than that, the actor who plays the Big Cook of the title either can't cook and is actually anxious around food, or gives a bloody good impression of being so. But most infuriating is that no children are involved in the cooking. It is a child-free zone - yet there is so much that small kids can do in the kitchen and so much that they can learn about food there. Finally, nobody is ever seen eating anything. Stupid play food is shoved through a hatch to an unseen guest, where presumably the contents are scraped into the bin before the empty plate is sent back. The only interaction with food is when they throw it at each other, which is shameful. Helpfully, as I get to watch quite a lot of it at the moment, I am a big fan of the BBC's pre-school TV output. But Big Cook, Little Cook by itself would justify the recent failure by the BBC to get the raise in the licence fee they wanted.
I'm afraid it's a week for rants. This review was meant to come from deepest rural England. Unfortunately, a blizzard of Arctic proportions dropped, ooh, half an inch of snow on us, and all transport links failed. I couldn't get out of town. So to make up for it I went to Bumpkin in Notting Hill, which styles itself as a place 'for city folk who like a little country living'. This, I should confess, is the sort of contrivance I hate: unless they splatter you with mud at the door and let sheep roam freely between the tables, crapping where they may, I can't see how a Notting Hill joint will ever replicate country living. Just to be clear: they do neither of these. Instead, it means the wallpaper carries a leaf motif, there are garlands of twigs and fruit over the mirrors, and the waiters have to wear T-shirts bearing the legends 'Country girl' and 'Country boy'. They should have stopped at a first syllable of the first word.
And so to more irritations. I phoned to book for 1pm and was told it had to be 1.15pm. Naturally, when I got there it was completely empty, and when I asked why I had been refused the time of my choice they couldn't tell me. A heater, like a hair dryer on overtime, boomed into the room, as did music. I asked the waitress if she could turn down the sounds. And she said: 'Sorry? What was that?' She eventually got the message, scowled at me, but did turn it down.
Curiously, for a place so limply run, some of the food is fine in a 'nothing to do with the country' sort of way. At lunchtime there is a selection of dishes for one or two, including cassoulet. It was not an exemplar of its kind, lacking the full-on rich, meaty kick this dish should offer. But the leg of duck confit plonked on top was crisp enough, and on a winter's day the mix of beans and sausage underneath was satisfying. Whether it justified the £16 price tag is another matter. A special of the day, a pork chop with sage butter, looked like good value at £12, and the thick-cut chop itself was an exceptionally good cut of meat, sympathetically prepared. But that's all there was on the plate, a lonely chop. As sides are £3 each, the bill can soon mount up.
To do this in reverse, the two salads with which we started were modestly accomplished assemblies. One of smoked eel with bacon, potato and mustard was marred only by the inclusion of a piece of eel that was all fin and bone. Another of good roast chicken with endive and watercress was let down by the presence of floppy roast tomatoes that made the whole affair mushy. Puddings are of the admirable pie and crumble sort, but by then, weighed down by cassoulet, I'd had enough of not being in the country in Notting Hill. And so, it being that sort of day, I headed off to find another part of London where I could also not be in the country.
