Blandford Comptoir, 1 Blandford Street, London W1U 3DA (020 7935 4626). Meal for two, including wine and service: £90-£140
Context matters. And so, while I suspect you’re sick of the grinding tumult and heartbreak, I should tell you that I ate at Blandford Comptoir the day before the EU referendum and wrote about it the day after. The lunchtime I visited, a man sat at the marble counter FaceTiming a friend in Italian. Normally I would hate the intrusion of that tinny digitised voice, but at that point when nothing had yet been lost and all was to win, I welcomed it. That was the inclusive London I know and love: a rush of languages I don’t understand but accept as the sound of openness.
Sitting here in this fancy bit of town, I welcomed Blandford Comptoir, too: smart, cosmopolitan in an understated way, at ease with a vocabulary and grammar that has nothing to do with England or the English. It’s located in a world city called London. You’ll find it on the map a couple of hours northwest of Paris and a few more southwest of Copenhagen. Look beneath this piece and others online and regularly that one word, London, has been re-engineered as an expletive – a synonym for snobbery and excess and exclusion, the restaurants I review an expression of that.
Some of it is justified. Every major city has stupidities. Some of those stupidities are restaurants. If you want to hate London based on its restaurants, empty your bank account into Smith & Wollensky or Novikov. That’s a warning, not a recommendation. But London is also home to concentrations of brilliant cheap Turkish grill houses and ramen shops; of superb Hunanese places that make your scalp sweat, and Kashmiri curry shops that smell of more roasting spices than you could name; of killer sushi bars, world-beating tapas joints, and Korean cafés ripe with the stench of fermenting cabbage. Immigration brings us so much. Brilliant food opportunities are both the most obvious and the most banal of them. But I’m greedy, so obviously that’s the one I obsess about. Everything is about my dinner.
And yes, other places in the UK have bits and pieces of this, but nothing like they do in London. I could lie about that to protect regional pride. I could tell you you’ll eat just as well in, ooh, Doncaster or Leicester or Bath. But will you understand if – after this wretched vote, after so many people have muttered “bloody immigrants” and then stabbed at the ballot sheet with stubby pencils like toddlers with crayons – I don’t feel in the mood? Look, I’m not an idiot. I know Brexit does not mean the end of terrific Italian restaurants (and Blandford Comptoir is one.) It’s about much more important things than that. But it is about turning inwards, about regarding the word “cosmopolitan” as an epithet rather than a virtue. The existence of this restaurant is a product of long-term EU membership. And we’re leaving.
The 40-seat, dark-blue and parqueted Blandford Comptoir was set up by Xavier Rousset – with a name like that you can be sure he wasn’t born in Nuneaton – the man behind both Texture and 28°-50°. Like the latter, it sells itself on the wines: a good selection by the glass and half carafe, but also a serious list by the bottle grouped by price point starting at £23 and rising upwards, with at least 10 choices in each band. Few are obvious. My Godello, a crisp Spanish white, is just the thing for a menu like this full of sunlight, big flavours and seriousness.
In some ways, then, this is a London companion to Corkage in Bath. Except here you could quite happily be teetotal. The menu is essentially Italian without feeling the need to bulk things up with pasta. Most dishes come in both half and full sizes. Sicilian red prawns, an increasingly common sight in London since the Chelsea fishmonger Rex Mariano secured a good supply, are served raw, the tails both sweet and sticky. You dredge them through a puddle of oil scented with Amalfi lemons, suck on the funk of the heads, and pretend that outside the door is the sensory overload of the docks where they were landed.
Courgette flowers, bursting from vegetables practically still in the foetal stage, are filled with a light goat’s curd that has collapsed unto liquid in the heat of the deep-fat fryer. The battered leaves holding the centre back are as lacy as Aunt Jemima’s antimacassars. Two fat scallops, their surface seared, the rest just set, perch on a heap of fresh peas and podded green beans which in turn lies in a puddle of a light seafood broth. It is the nubile bounce of early summer. A large piece of hake, the skin crisp, pearly flakes slipping away from each other, comes on an equally sprightly sauté of globe artichokes.
From the meatier list there’s a terrine with a heart of rabbit which, while strong on the craftsmanship, could do with a whack of seasoning. So much better are chunky-thighed legs of quail, quick roasted, and glazed with the sort of intense sticky reduction you chase around the bottom of the roasting pan with one fat finger. (You don’t do that? Oh.) There are toasted pine nuts and thick rounds of an impeccable truffled boudin. This is unapologetically high-bourgeois cooking. It’s the edible equivalent of a well-groomed chap in a smoking jacket and velvet slippers with a bulb of aged brandy warming in his palm. It’s a steadying hand on your shoulder when times are tough, and right now they are. It’s food made by someone who gives a damn.
It costs £14 for the full-sized versions, as most things do here. If you want to spend more, there’s a 1kg côte de boeuf with confit new season garlic, a red wine jus and Jersey royals, £60 for two. And that still looks like a bargain. I’m not convinced dessert is a priority here. They do a serviceable plum and frangipane tart and a chocolate pot topped with a biscuit crumb. Their interest lies more with cheese and the wine to go with them, which makes sense. I think you get the point by now. I like Blandford Comptoir. It’s a place which attends to the essentials. It’s the kind of place where lunch makes things better. It’s the sort of restaurant that, increasingly, London does really well. And right now I’m going to take comfort in that. Bring me another plate of the quail.
Jay’s news bites
■ I’ve mentioned the rather lovely Pall Mall Fine Wines before. It gets a second mention because the food offering – a range of charcuterie and cheeses – has expanded, and it can all be eaten there or taken home. The wine bar is tucked away down an arcade which always looks closed, just off Pall Mall. Follow the smell of the cheese (pallmallfinewine.co.uk).
■ In an act of glorious optimism, the Q &V Royal Mile Hotel has introduced Edinburgh’s only outdoor afternoon tea. Anyone who has enjoyed Edinburgh’s summer weather may understand why they have this market to themselves. Tea includes the likes of a liquorice panna cotta and a negroni jelly. I’m not sure these will make up for all the rain (quorvuscollection.com).
■ A waiter at STK, the restaurant of the ME hotel on London’s Aldwych, has been given his job back after his union intervened over what they said was his unfair dismissal. Robert Czegely, from Hungary, was dismissed after complaining about the way tips were being distributed.
Jay Rayner’s new book, The Ten (Food) Commandments, is out now (£6, Penguin). To order a copy for £5.10, go to bookshop.theguardian.com
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
