Clipstone, 5 Clipstone Street, London W1W 6BB (020 7637 0871). Meal for two including drinks and service: £80-£120
Among the readers of these reviews is a group of men preoccupied with their own arses. This is not abuse. I’m being literal. Each week they find the column online, ignore the glittering prose and study the seating arrangements, so as to comment on whether they could manage two hours on the chairs. It doesn’t matter whether I describe food with the delicacy of an angel’s teardrop, or glorious indulgences worthy of being denoted the eighth, ninth and 10th deadly sins. If the chairs look too hard, it’s a fatal black mark. They aren’t interested.
Who are these people? Are they men with skinny arses that need cushioning? In which case what are they doing reading this column? I regard these paragraphs as a safe space for what Alexander McCall Smith referred to, in his No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency novels, as the “traditionally built”. If you have a large arse, you are among friends here. Alternatively, I’m attracting people with eating habits that have resulted in life-threatening cases of haemorrhoids. Perhaps proctologists should try touting for business below the line on my reviews.
None of those men will contemplate going to this week’s restaurant. Clipstone is a place of hard, uncompromising surfaces; of echo and bash. If it’s not at a right angle, it didn’t make the cut. There’s dark wood flooring, another area finished in tiny grey mosaic tiles like a bathroom splashback and, of course, an open kitchen. It bellows cool, hard-nosed efficiency. Stop worrying about the upholstery, it says. Don’t come here for the glitz. Look at the food on the plate. And you should, because most of it is delightful, with a few excursions into bliss and ah!
Clipstone, named after the street in London’s Fitzrovia on whose corner it sits, is a sibling of the nearby Portland (on Great Portland Street). The team are Will Lander, who relaunched the Quality Chop House in Farringdon, and Daniel Morgenthau, formerly of the very lovely 10 Greek Street. The exec chef is Merlin Labron-Johnson, who disappointingly turns out not to be a character in Game of Thrones. He cut his teeth in Belgium and has an on-trend interest in curing, fermenting and northern European sour notes from cultured creams. But the kitchen also understands and has a deep affection for classicism. Here it’s all executed with extreme deftness by Stuart Andrew, formerly a sous chef at Portland. The point about all this “rock family tree” stuff is that Clipstone is part of a restaurant culture, a way of doing things. They do it very well.
It being 2016 you will have to navigate the business of small plates, and the announcement that dishes will come to you when it suits the kitchen. With food this assured I’m willing to take it on the chin. From the short list of cold cuts and crudos comes a plate of lardo, the cured back fat of the pig, served at room temperature so that all is softness and silk; it’s a trip to the lingerie department for the tongue. Alongside is the sweet crunch and crack of caramelised walnuts. A bit of their sourdough, all friable crust and acidic crumb, might have helped this along, but curiously they don’t deliver the bread until halfway through the meal.
Perhaps it’s just too precious. The serving of the rabbit and pork rillettes dotted carefully with jewels of grain mustard comes in a vast heap on just one slice of that bread, as if it were the South Downs modelled from offal. It is pungent and deep and soothing and so generous it could easily have been spread across two slices. It’s more outrageous this way.
We have lightly battered and deep fried baby leeks, served still warm, with a cooling sauce gribiche, punchy with mustard. Thick slices of grilled ox tongue, pink and soft in the middle, come with crunchy radishes and the soft-sour kick of crème fraîche. Most pleasing is an impeccable lobe of calf’s brain on toast, perfectly dressed with demi-glace and capers. The great Henry Harris used to do this at his Knightsbridge restaurant Racine. I knew people who would go there just for that dish, because there are few cooks who can be bothered to get it right. Maintaining the texture and integrity of calves’ brains requires a light touch. The kitchen at Clipstone gets it absolutely right. And if you are squirming at the thought of this, you are banned from ever reading this column again. Repeat after me: if we are going to kill animals for food we eat every bit, including the soft creamy brains, especially beneath an intense savoury glaze, with the acidic burst of capers.
The site was previously a pizzeria and they have kept the wood-fired oven for sourdough flatbreads, which produced the only dud in the meal. We had the version with pork shoulder, fennel and the light bitterness of dandelion, which read better than it ate. The crust was overly chewy and the meat registered only as protein. It felt like a self-conscious attempt not to be a pizza, while at the same time not being quite as good as a pizza.
Things picked up with pearly flakes of cod, the white of new piano keys, steamed en papillote, with a seaweed butter the colour of a Wimbledon court before the tournament has begun. These were ingredients from shore and surf that made sense together. There are just two desserts. One is a bowl of strawberries with a white chocolate cream on the side. The other is a classic Paris-Brest: whorls of sweetened whipped cream, between discs of sugar-dusted choux pastry. It is these outbreaks of serious old school cooking – the sauce gribiche, the calf’s brain, this dessert – which make me love Clipstone the most. It is not obsessed with the new and edgy for its own sake; there is an instinct to feed.
Most of the small plates are between £6 and £10. The faux pizzas and the mains run from £10 to £17, with one beef dish at £45. There are good house cocktails which slap you round the chops while whispering “I love you”, and a significant wine choice by the glass. Of course, the bill can mount. Those who ask only after price rather than value, may look from those hard-arsed chairs to that bill and back again. The rest of us, the greedy ones with the well-toned buttocks, will understand.
Jay’s news bites
■ Like Clipstone, the venerable Great Queen Street took its name from its address. Owner Tom Norrington-Davies, who cut his teeth at the Eagle, may no longer be in the kitchen but his thumb prints are all over the menu. It’s the place for potted shrimps and pickled cucumber, roast pork with green beans and anchoiade and a suet-crusted chicken pie for two (greatqueenstreetrestaurant.co.uk).
■ Time to start saving up. Next month sees the publication of Raymond Blanc’s meisterwork, a collection of 120 recipes from his Oxfordshire restaurant
Le Manoir Aux Quat’Saisons. The basic hardback edition is a mere £50.
But there’s also a special edition, in a slip case, the edges of the pages gilded in silver. Oh, and the end pages are scented with lavender. Yours for £250. (Hint: it’s my birthday this month).
■ More proof of the onward march of the burger. Research company Mintel has found that the market for grilled minced beef patties in a bun is now worth £3.28bn up 22% from its £2.7 billion value in 2011.
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
Correction: the photograph of the ox tongue was originally miscaptioned as rabbit and pork rilletes. Corrected on 14 September 2016
