The Seaside Boarding House, Burton Bradstock, Dorset (01308 897 205). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £80
From the outside the Seaside Boarding House, on the coast just down from the Dorset village of Burton Bradstock, looks very much at ease in its surroundings. It is a solid whitewashed building with big picture windows looking out to sea as if keeping watch. There is a route down to the demerara-hued ribbon of Chesil Beach spooling away eastwards towards Weymouth, and a constant breeze of the sort that would make a child’s kite crack and flap. Just standing on its steps, you sense it as a place in which to decompress from the pressures of city life.
You have to get inside, get a menu in your hands (alongside a chilled glass of prosecco) and learn its backstory to understand that, in truth, the Seaside Boarding House, and more especially its lovely food, wouldn’t exist were it not for the city. It is the distillation of more than three decades of the London restaurant world.
The capital is getting a kicking at the moment, and with good reason. It is pulling away economically and culturally from the rest of the country, leaving Britain without an identifiable core. It is pricing itself so that committed people doing the sort of vital jobs that any city needs to function can no longer afford to live in the place where they work. It is sucking up talent.
But those same negatives have also had positive effects over the years. Too often we credit working-class boys like Marco and Gordon with energising Britain’s restaurant revolution. In truth, us greedy people owe a debt to a bunch of middle-class, often university-educated kids who came to London in the late 70s and early 80s, running away from England’s puritan streak in search of appetite and good taste; the likes of Sally Clarke and Simon Hopkinson, Ruth Rogers and Rose Grey at the River Café, and Alastair Little and Rowley Leigh with their Oxbridge degrees. Because if you are young and bright and hungry it is to the city you must go. It might look like a choice, but it isn’t really. Nothing else would ever make sense.
Mary-Lou Sturridge, one of the founders of the Boarding House, knows a bit about London. She ran the Groucho Club in Soho for more than 20 years, but eventually tired of seeing too many of the small hours of the morning on Dean Street. So here she is, in partnership with Anthony Mackintosh, a co-founder of the Groucho. It is a space of calming whites and sunlight and art by Peter Blake. You know the bar will mix you a perfect ice-cold martini.
For her executive chef, Sturridge has chosen a man who made his name one block down from the Groucho Club. Alastair Little is the patron saint of unfussy. (Legend has it he was once told by Michelin that his minimalist Frith Street bistro would never get a star because he didn’t have tablecloths; he didn’t buy any tablecloths.) If there is such a thing as modern European cooking – a touch of confit here, a pasta dish there – he has as good a claim as any to having codified it. He is now here in the kitchen three days a month.
Among the starters comes a fish soup, the colour of copper coins, full of sweet, fishy caramelised flavours and nutty tones. It is properly garnished. There are oily croutons and a heap of grated gruyère and a fine stinky rouille that shouts garlic at you and keeps shouting until you get the idea. As if to welcome the coming autumn there is a salad of roast and pickled squash – it is a plate of bronze and orange – with the crunch of walnuts and a dressing punched up by the addition of a little miso.
Most pleasingly there is Rowley Leigh’s hot parmesan custard with crispbreads smeared with salted anchovy. I first ate this at Leigh’s sadly missed Le Café Anglais in the Whiteleys building near Hyde Park, and it is here exactly as I recall it: a hot, set savoury cream, just pulling away from the sides of the ramekin, made with fistfuls of aged parmesan, alongside something crisp and salty with which to scrape it up. The inclusion of this dish is one veteran of London’s restaurant wars bending the knee to another.
A salad of hot roasted lamb under a heap of leaves with redcurrants is one of those main-course dishes engineered for those of us who are trying to be good at lunchtime, but it’s cheerful and engaging for all that. A perfectly cooked piece of hake, its skin blistered from the heat, is much more the thing. It comes with a pile of nutty lentils, a few dollops of pesto and some huge fat caper berries that look like they’re waiting to be strung together and worn as jewellery. We order a bowl of chips because we are by the sea and are planning a stroll along the beach. (To misquote Groucho Marx, these are my excuses. If you don’t like them I have others.) I am used to seeing the uniform cut of the McCain Foodservice product in a shocking number of places that really should know better. It’s immediately obvious that these terrific chips started here as potatoes. It’s a small thing, but it matters.
Star of the desserts is a crumbly ginger syrup cake, topped with roasted discs of banana, which is a party where all the right people have been introduced to each other. Another dessert is simply vanilla ice cream with a cracking salted-caramel sauce. Let that into the party with the banana cake and things really begin to swing. Throw on the brownie with its heart of pure squidge and all the bases are covered.
Do I need tell you they serve good coffee? No, of course I don’t, because that’s the point. The whitewashed and sunlit dining room and bar at the Seaside Boarding House is just extremely civilised. They do all the important things right, and at a good price: starters are £7, desserts are £6 or less, and mains are in the teens. Or there’s a set three-course lunch for £17. They just want you to know that, in here, with this rippling view of the sea, everything is going to be OK. It will irritate some that I argue it took a sensibility crafted in London’s buzz and clatter to create this slice of heaven-on-sea. But the fact remains: without the capital, it wouldn’t be here. And that would be a crying shame.
Jay’s news bites
■ Alastair Little stepped away from running a restaurant full time a few years ago, but now has a west-London deli called Tavola, much beloved by its regulars for its couscous or roast vegetable salads, for its pastries and tarts. It’s the place for truffle paste and three different kinds of risotto rice, and those very passable French brands of fish soup in jars for when you can’t get Little round to make it for you (tavolalondon.co.uk).
■ The great Marguerite Patten, who died in June, would have turned 100 on 4 November. To celebrate the centenary she so nearly made, the Guild of Food Writers is asking people to cook her recipes on that day and then tweet, Facebook, blog and Instagram the results using the hashtag #Marguerite100. It’s a lovely idea. For more info and Marguerite’s recipes, visit gfw.co.uk.
■ Crowdfunding campaign of the week: throw your dosh at This is Bacon, which wants to bring its range of flavoured bacons, including herb and chilli ranges, as well as turkey, duck and beef bacons, to a wider market (thisisbacon.co.uk).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk
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