The Game Bird, The Stafford, 16-18 St James’s Place, London SW1A 1NJ (020 7518 1234). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £140
It takes guts to write a menu full of original dishes nobody has ever heard of before. But just how much more courage does it take to write a menu full of the blindingly familiar; of dishes most people have tried and have opinions on? This is a peculiarly British thing. In Lyon or Milan, Barcelona or Munich, new restaurants offering endless iterations of the old open all the time. It’s what happens when you have a robust culinary culture: there is a menu, and you are expected to treat it with the respect accorded to the scriptures by the devout. The eater’s game is to find the place that does the best pot au feu or the best risotto Milanese.
In Britain generally and London in particular it’s not like this. The upside of a lack of certainty about what our own food might be, is openness. We’ll try bloody anything, and there’s always someone willing to offer just that. The downside is a pronounced neophilia, the chasing of the novel for its own sake. Miso-glazed kitten on a stick? In a railway arch in Haggerston? Open the doors and watch the queues build. Pig blood crème brûlée? All those words sound like food. Why the hell not? Fill your belly and your boots.
Chef James Durrant’s menu at the Game Bird laughs in the face of novelty. It has no interest in the cutting edge, the startling or the innovative. It sells itself on one thing and one thing only: execution. Can it offer the very best versions of the familiar? The answer is, yes it can, and how. In a time of grinding restlessness, the Game Bird is about a very special kind of continuity; of eternal verities nuzzled up to and whispered sweet nothings at. Come here on a good day and you’ll have a lovely time. Come here on a bad day and the menu – British grill classics, cooked with jugs full of French technique – will make sure all the bad stuff stays outside.
It is located in a series of plump-cushioned, bloomed and perfumed lounges at the Stafford, a heavily varnished boutique hotel tucked away in one of London’s crevices. For the full through-the-wardrobe experience reach it via a narrow alleyway off the eastern side of Green Park, about 300m down from Piccadilly. I ate here once before, when the restaurant operation was called the Lyttleton. I hated it. I felt less looked after than interred. It was a dinner full of solemnity, numbingly dull cooking and unfulfilled promises. It was that exhausting calculus of a massive bill and little to show for it.
The bill here will still be sizeable – the wine list has massive choice at £40, but sod all below that – but there is a lightness about the experience which will allow you to pretend you haven’t gone bankrupt to pay for lunch. Consider the starters of steak tartare and dressed Cornish crab, of duck liver parfait or London particular, that brilliant green pea soup with the textural shock of crisped bacon.
Best of all consider the theatre of the smoked fish trolley. The smoked salmon is from Forman’s, the circumstances demand it; it has the dense texture, the light cure and the absence of slipperiness you dream of in smoked salmon but rarely find. There is their own gravadlax with the waft of dill, as well as smoked eel and other things besides. And all of this sliced and delivered to you as if it was your first born, alongside a choice of condiments to make you giggle: a horseradish cream, and finally chopped egg, cucumber and dill pickle and mustard dressing and capers and, of course, nutty, treacly soda bread because anything else would be wrong. And wrong doesn’t happen here.
It’s called the Game Bird and the menu always has one: at the moment a roast squab pigeon, fully garnished. Look over to the far wall and you’ll see a hanging cabinet, complete with a few feathered birds, waiting their moment. But let your eye drift down the menu to a list of pies, puddings and stews, including a venison stew, a hotpot of hogget and best of all – cease my aching heart – a beef and ale steamed suet pudding. The tourist buses that ply their trade from outside Green Park tube should put this pudding on the route, especially when drenched in the glossiest of meat reductions. The pudding is all soft-steamed doughy loveliness, giving way to a dense filling of cow. It is sticky and unctuous and rich and sustaining. It is the word “happy” fashioned from ingredients.
Another one of those killer sauces, spun through with grain mustard, turns up with grilled calf’s liver, served pink with a bourguignon-style garnish of lardons and pearl onions and a few crisped new potatoes. We have sides of red cabbage, lightly pickled, and chips, crisp enough to suggest they really have been cooked three times. Other things still demand my attention for subsequent visits: the oysters Rockefeller, and the whole sole meunière, the côte de boeuf for two with beef dripping potatoes and sauce bordelaise, the whimsy of chicken Kiev and the seriousness of roast mallard. On Sundays there is a roast rib of beef for £25. You’re not surprised, are you? I find myself flicking through menus for breakfast and afternoon tea, trying to plan a lifetime of niceness. I could live here. Perhaps I should.
Black Forest comes from the patisserie side of the dessert ledger, and is the sort you tend only to find coming from hotel kitchens, with a dedicated cold chocolate room. A vertical cylinder of perfectly tempered dark chocolate is filled with all the things – a dark chocolate sponge and a light chocolate mousse, cherries and kirsch and a little bright light cherry sorbet – that you would wish to find. It’s a glamorous, shiny way to finish. If you don’t want to eat it, you could wear it as a fascinator.
But it’s overshadowed by a Lyle’s Golden Syrup sponge with custard, as most things would be. Say those words over to yourself. Say them again. It’s now what you’re hoping to eat for pudding, if not today then tomorrow. The sponge is light on top, and sodden below. The custard is warm and silky. And at the table the mood softens. The word “replete” comes to mind and stays there. And so, we are done. Some restaurant reviews are a list of dishes. Some are social commentary. This one is a love letter.
Jay’s news bites
■ It’s been a while since I mentioned Rules, London’s oldest restaurant, but it’s hard not to in the context of the Game Bird. It’s never a prisoner to its history, and still does the thing. There, the suet steak and kidney pudding comes with an optional oyster. The list of game, from their own estate, includes wild duck, pheasant, venison and the warning that some dishes may contain shot (rules.co.uk).
■ Bristol’s Afrika Eye festival, a celebration of African film and culture, this year includes a new element: Horn of Africa cooking classes. On 6-7 November Naget Hussein and Negla Abdul Hadi will be running classes in the kitchens at City of Bristol College, focussing on dishes from Eritrea, Ethiopia and North Sudan. To book, go to afrikaeye.org.uk.
■ The late Jim Harrison was one of the true greats when it came to writing about food. He combined an attention to detail with a glorious prose style and a massive appetite. His last collection of essays, A Really Big Lunch, will be published by Atlantic Books in December. A must read.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
