“I’m bricking it a bit,” says Michael Davies, chef/co-owner of The Camberwell Arms in south-east London, when I ask for his reaction to OFM’s reader-voted Sunday lunch gong. “We do up to 200 on Sunday already, so Christ knows what we’ll get now.”
But if anyone can cope, it’s Davies – and not just because he recently opened an extra dining room upstairs. His fellow owners are veterans at this lark: Jonathan Jones, Rob Shaw, Trish Hilferty and Charlie Bousfield’s collective CVs include such restaurant royalty as the Eagle in Farringdon and the grandaddy of modern British cuisine, St John, and they now also run the Anchor & Hope in Waterloo and the Canton Arms in Stockwell. Add Claire Roberson, brought in as general manager after she sold up at Hackney’s Mayfields last year, and you’ve as solid a back-up team as you could wish for.
Davies, now 27, credits Jones and Hilferty, in particular, for his cooking style. “The first time I met JJ, I turned up at the Anchor for a trial, and he emerged from the store room with a bloodied cleaver in one hand and music blaring behind him. He looked me up and down, bellowed, ‘We need staff!’ and that was me sold. And Trish, well, if she hadn’t had the patience to let me mess up her kitchen for two years, I wouldn’t be talking to you now.”
So why worry about the potential impact of the award? “The thing is,” Davies says plaintively, “it’s not as if we do a traditional Sunday roast anyway.” He ain’t wrong there: his menu is far removed from the roast chicken/beef/pork/lamb with all the trimmings norm, and the vegetarian options aren’t the usual throwaway afterthoughts. On one recent Sunday, starters included creamed sweetcorn and pickled red onion on crumpet and brown shrimp avocado cocktail, while mains featured day-boat squid, courgettes, tapenade and creme fraiche, and bloodcake, fried duck egg, triple-cooked chips and watercress. Hell, they even make charcuterie and cured fish in-house.
“And we don’t do Yorkshire puddings,” Davies adds, a little apologetically. Mind you, why should he? “I didn’t grow up eating Sunday roasts,” he explains. “I’m Jewish with a Swedish mum, and on Sundays we usually had reworked leftovers, which I love. I haven’t really thought of it this way before, but that’s kind of similar to what we do here: we look at what’s left in the fridge after service on Saturday night and work out Sunday’s menu from there.”
That’s not to say Davies doesn’t cater to traditionalists; he just does it in a smart, understated way. That same recent menu also listed porchetta with kale and roast potatoes, rabbit and smoked bacon pie for two (“There’s always a pie”), and slow-roast salt marsh lamb with dauphinoise potatoes for four or five; a half or whole spit-roast chicken is a regular fixture. “It may not be your standard roast,” Davies says, “but it is in spirit. We do big platters, and serve them for people to carve and help themselves. To me, Sunday lunch is about people coming together to enjoy each others’ company as much as the food.”
While it never pays to second-guess readers, I’d bet that, more than anything else, is why you lot voted Davies’s Sunday lunch Britain’s best.
The Camberwell Arms, 65 Camberwell Church Street, London SE5; 020 7358 4364; thecamberwellarms.co.uk
