Telephone: 020 7253 0723
Address: 6 Carthusian Street, London EC1
Lunch for two, including wine and service, £60
They don't go in for unnecessary adornment at the Sutton Arms. Everything is stripped back to the essentials, be it on the walls or the plate. The upstairs dining room at this pub on the fringes of London's City is decorated in a flock wallpaper painted a sunny magnolia - much as you would expect the upstairs room of a London pub to look. The chairs are tiny wooden affairs with a slot in the back perhaps designed for a hymn book, as if they had fallen off the back of a Sunday school. I found myself fearing for their integrity beneath my gravitationally challenged arse. But as with everything at the Sutton Arms, they proved robust.
The chef, Rosie Sykes, is a food writer for The Guardian. It strikes me that anybody who is setting out to prove they can do as well as teach might be tempted to engage in feats of kitchen alchemy. Sykes is wiser than that. The flavourings on her short menu - five choices at each course, a fiver for starters, £13 for mains - may well be eclectic; the four dishes we tried gave us tastes between them of Scotland, France and the Maghreb. But there was still a unifying principle, which might best be described as paysanne. This is country food, even if it isn't always from the same country.
My companion, a lady of great taste and occasionally small appetite, started out in the north of the British Isles with a bowl of smoked haddock chowder which she declared 'very good indeed'. It had great chunks of potato, a rich creamy broth and ripe flakes of fish. My starter of braised squid with lentils and tomato sauce came from somewhere far sunnier to the south. It had a lovely fishy intensity, soothed by the roundness of the sauce and the nuttiness of the lentils.
I followed that with grilled lamb chops, caramelised outside, pink within, which came with couscous and a heap of chickpeas in a sauce spiky with what tasted like preserved lemons. For her main course, my companion ordered a second starter, an accomplished chicken liver parfait with toast and a salad of bobby beans - green beans that have been at the steroids - in a creamy vinaigrette. Puddings are of the greengage fool and custard tart variety. There is a 40-strong wine list that begins at £10 a bottle, almost half of which - praise be - is available by the glass. Service, by one unflappable chap, is slick if unhurried, and my chair didn't collapse. All of which, I think, qualifies this as a great lunch.
