Plot, Unit 70-72, Broadway Market, Tooting High Street, London SW17 0RL (020 8767 2639). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £80
It would be a mistake to write about Plot, a sliver of a restaurant serving terrible cocktails and great food in one of south London’s traditional covered markets, without first rehearsing the arguments around gentrification. It demands that context. We know where the G-word starts: with a bunch of self-serving fiscal policies which attract oligarchs and other non-doms up to their nipples in filthy cash into London. They buy up all the property, forcing the merely well-off out to the inner suburbs, who in turn force up prices. Each socio-economic group goes further and further out of the centre.
Those on lower, but still good incomes, come in search of cheaper property, and with them come businesses to service their needs. High streets which were once full of shops selling things that people actually need become infested by men with beards making pulled pork. Suddenly there are artisanal coffee shops, and clashing food concepts fusing the traditional dishes of Cambodia with, say, those of Wales.
Caricature aside, there have generally been only two ways to view this. Either all economic activity is good and to be applauded. Yay, for pulled pork and so on. Or gentrification makes everyday life prohibitively expensive for the traditional populations of these areas, who are on lower incomes and deserve better. The reality lies somewhere in the middle. What matters is an enlightened approach by landlords and local councils to managing the high-street economy. Get it wrong and a neighbourhood really can disappear up its own gilded fundament. Get it right and there’s more money for the council to run its services.
Tooting High Road is going through the process right now and, for the most part, it seems to be working. The cafés serving the Pakistani and Gujarati community are still doing a roaring trade. Real shops selling things people need still trade. Covered markets are being repaired, and new businesses are flocking in. On a Saturday evening, you can come here for esoteric wines, Japanese gyoza, and misshapen pizza the colour of dirty paving stones.
Plot, a long, white tiled and steel space, is obviously a part of that. It is London 2017, one food order at a time. It occupies a long unit inside Broadway Market from which light pours out into the shadowed walkways. Usually these would be dark. Now that darkness is broken by clatter and clink. There’s a marble counter for seating plus communal tables, and a pronounced commitment to both British ingredients and, more worryingly, local sourcing. That’s a terrifying idea in Tooting; have you seen the wildlife on the Common?
A short menu of just two starters, two mains and a couple of sides suggests at first kids playing at restaurants. Yes, it’s a small kitchen staffed by only two cooks, but is three at each course too much to ask? Those cocktails really do not help. There’s one made with lemon curd and vodka which makes my teeth ache. It’s a 1990s alcopop only with more violence and fewer grace notes. Another made with pickling liquor from the saffron cucumbers jar on the counter is just all kinds of wrong, shaken together and left to die of embarrassment in a glass.
But then they deliver bread (brought in from elsewhere) with pre-mixed Marmite butter and I can’t help smiling. If you’re going to do British, then you might as well do it properly. Each plateful after that delivers on its promise. There is thick asparagus from the Wye Valley served still warm and draped with ragged pieces of pink grapefruit (from Britain’s sunnier bits presumably). They come with a citrus hollandaise which has been rendered foamy courtesy of a nitrous gun. We prod away with the grass, bringing up dollops of sauce. A smoked ham hock and roast chicken terrine is a solid thing, made with old-fashioned craft and enthusiasm. On the side are pieces of the pickled cucumber, which really was a much better use for the pickling liquor.
Thick curls of squid, crusted with a chorizo crumb on a salad of tomatoes that taste of something, is a bit of textural fun. It’s followed by a dainty salad of hanger steak, the pieces seared outside, while inside left the purple of the evening sky before darkness finally falls. There are shavings of radish, watercress leaves and dollops of a truffled mayo. Jersey Royals come mashed up with ladlefuls of hot melted minted butter; purple sprouting broccoli is seared in a hot pan until singed, and thrown together with garlic and chilli. And that’s the menu, fully consumed.
Desserts are a take on the creamy things in a bowl that I’ve moaned about recently. There’s a lemon posset with a pink peppercorn shortbread biscuit, and a chocolate pudding, all liquid centre beneath baked shell. The accompanying milk ice cream is soothing against all that darkness and intensity.
At the end of all this, I want very much to be a cheerleader for Plot. I admire its pluck and courage, its determination to do its own thing away from the centre; to bring quality cooking so far down the southern end of the tube. But I can’t do so, not quite. Everything they cook really does deliver on its promise. The flavours are precise and intense, the platings spare and civilised. But the menu really is extremely short.
And then there’s the prices. Individually they look OK: £7.50 for asparagus and the terrine, £8.50 for the hanger steak salad, a fiver for the broccoli. It mounts up. Throw in a bottle of wine from even the lowest reaches of the short list and suddenly you’re staring at a bill of at least £80 for two. At which point even I have to say that’s an awful lot of money to sit in a less than comfortable space, in a darkened and dusty covered market, in the heart of the ever so happening Tooting. It doesn’t feel opportunistic. I’m sure none of them are getting rich quick. But it does feel wrong, as if the cultural, social and actual arithmetic simply doesn’t add up. When the naysayers come to moan – about this sort of cost and this sort of restaurant in this sort of place impacting on that sort of local community – it really will be difficult to argue.
Jay’s news bites
■ Native in London’s Covent Garden also tries to source everything from within the UK, but succeeds in spite of its rather grand claims about the value of wild foods, rather than because of them. Ignore the mission statements and enjoy instead the likes of Dorset mackerel with salt baked beets and rhubarb, venison from the South Downs and prune loaf with Kirkham’s Lancashire cheese (eatnative.co.uk).
■ More news from restaurateur Alan Yau, who recently managed to record a £1.88m loss at his Soho Chinese pub Duck and Rice despite taking £80,000 a week. New figures show Park Chinois, his luxe recreation of a 1930s Shanghai dinner dance club, where the seats are almost always full and the roast duck costs £95, made a loss of almost £6m in the year to March 2016. Gosh.
■ A number of people have asked where the rustic Japanese-style ceramics used by Box-E in Bristol come from. They are made by Heritage Collection of Small Heath in Birmingham and are available for purchase online at heritagecollectionuk.com.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
