Terroirs Wine Bar & restaurant
5 William IV st, London WC2,
020 7036 0660.
Meal for two, including drinks and service £75
I was wandering through London's Borough Market, as you do when you're greedy, comfortably off, status-obsessed and middle class (the latter being a synonym for the other three) when it struck me that it provided an answer to what it meant to be British. Here was lamb from the Lake District and fish from Cornwall, asparagus from the Midlands and game from Scotland. You could forge an entire national identity through this food. This would be cobblers, of course - an exercise in mythology. It would only work if these ingredients genuinely did hark back to some great tradition, but they don't. Our great-grandparents never got their hands on produce this good.
Still, forging a national identity through food can work. The French did it brilliantly, via the notion of terroir, the idea that it was the very earth which defined the uniqueness of their great produce that sustained the French nation. That, too, was a load of cobblers. As the food writer and historian John Whiting explained in a paper to the Oxford Symposium on Food a few years ago, terroir was merely a beezer marketing spin, created by winemakers reacting to the devastation caused to the vines by phylloxera in the 1860s. The entire vine stock had to be replaced from that which had originally gone from France to the Americas. The French could no longer trumpet the uniqueness of their vines. What could they big up instead? Why, the earth.
On to this was grafted a whole bunch of dishes - coq au vin, cassoulet, and so on - which came to be intrinsically linked with notions of the horny-handed peasantry tilling the ancient land. This, too, was rubbish. According to Theodore Zeldin's History of French Passions, the peasants mostly lived on watery soup and millet and the dishes we think of as paysanne were perfected by bourgeois chefs up in Paris.
I love all this stuff, because it plays to my massive distrust of petty nationalism, the idea that mine is better than yours. It is only fear, rage and jealousy that leads someone to bang on about the specialness of their few acres. Don't believe me? Go find a goose farmer in the Dordogne and see if you can have a reasoned debate about North African immigration into France. I guarantee it won't be pretty.
So I am suspicious of terroir, but I do very much like a restaurant off London's Strand called Terroirs. Mostly I like it because they don't take the whole thing too seriously. Yes, a lot of the food here is earthy and French. The coarse toast with parsley-ballasted garlic butter, snails and bacon is one of the best things I've eaten this year. The duck skin scratchings, all crisp fat and crunch and salt, made me feel giddy and ashamed at the same time. Their rillettes are the real thing, and the ripe, crumbly terrine shows a kitchen versed in the essentials.
But there is also space here for sweet Jamon de Teruel from Spain and nutmeg-spiked potted shrimps from our shores. There is taramasalata, which is pale rather than Day-Glo, and mellow rather than sharp. Tense fillets of oil-rich Lincolnshire smoked eel come with a mustardy celeriac remoulade and a whole globe artichoke arrives with vinaigrette, which merely needed an additional dollop of Dijon mustard to make it sing.
There are some full-sized dishes - pot-roasted quail with pancetta and gremolata, for example, or salt cod with soft-boiled eggs - but I never got to them. I can't quite see the point. The majority of the menu is small dishes, few costing over £8, many a lot less than that, served with an eclectic selection of wines, many by the glass. I let the waiters make suggestions, and they did the job marvellously.
All of which may explain why, during a recession which is making other restaurateurs wince, they are doing a roaring trade. Is the success anything to do with their little corner of London, their property terroir? Of course not. It just happens to be a great restaurant, one which serves duck scratchings. Need I say more?
