Pique-Nique, Tanner Street Park, London SE1 3LD (020 7403 9549). Small plates £6.50-£10.50, large sharing dishes £42-£68, desserts £6.50-£7.50, wines from £18
A bright summer’s day, 36 hours after the easing of lockdown, and I am seated at a wide, socially distanced marble-topped counter. Two plates of food are pushed towards me. One holds tomatoes in brilliant reds, yellows and purples dressed with snowy white feta, shiny black olives and fat caper berries on their stalks, like musical notes in search of a stave. The other is a slice of pâté en croûte, the chubby pink of the pork studded with the brilliant green of pistachio and all of it framed by the Ford Granada walnut trim of glazed pastry work.
Look at these plates of loveliness. I am thrilled to be here at Pique-Nique, in a low-slung building tucked into the corner of a small sports ground in Bermondsey, south London. It’s not simply that restaurants have been able to reopen after more than 100 days. It’s that, in the past day and a half, not every eating adventure has worked out quite as well.
My first restaurant meal, chasing news deadlines, had been at Trullo, a neighbourhood Italian at Highbury Corner in north London. I was the first customer through the door on the day of reopening – and it was delightful. The second, later that evening, not so much. In early June a flashy London restaurant dropped a marketing email, inviting me to book for 4 July. I rewarded their bravado by booking for this week’s column. And so that Saturday night off I went, my heart full of unalloyed optimism.
It was various kinds of awful: underportioned servings of overengineered food at ludicrous prices, and wines by the glass measured out as if they were trying to get nine pours out of each bottle. As dinner trundled on, my heart fell to meet my knees. Oh God. I had recently tweeted that, for the foreseeable future, I wouldn’t be publishing negative reviews. If I went somewhere dismal, I would merely chalk it up to experience and move on. And now I was somewhere dismal.
My tweet hadn’t struck me as particularly controversial. God knows the restaurant business has been through enough. It didn’t need me going all Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride on failing places, as someone once put it. Some argued I would be failing in my duty as a ruthless, blood-smeared critic if I didn’t point out the bad as well as the good. Except there are literally thousands of dreadful restaurants I’ve never told you about. Still, on what must have been a slow news day, this proclamation of mine became an item on BBC2’s Newsnight (in which I didn’t participate because, while I’m not unfamiliar with grandiose gestures, there are limits). It was portrayed as an outbreak of kindness. But really, would you have wanted today’s column to be nine thick gallons of unplugged bile?
I had to find somewhere else. Which is why I ended up, 16 hours later, amid the kitsch mock-Tudor beams of this converted changing block. Back in the day malicious teenage boys doubtless whipped each other with wet coiled towels in here, for grim laughs. Now people like me perch on bar stools, or lounge on the terrace by the tennis courts, shovelling away plates of cracking ingredients treated with respect.
The space was converted in 2017 by the team behind Casse-Croûte just around the corner, and is so impeccably French, they even have a collection of those garishly coloured ceramic Gallic roosters that would look ludicrous anywhere other than on a marble-top bar like this, as a mark of revolutionary fervour. Not that the food is pushing boundaries. There are cheery sharing dishes cooked on the rotisserie at chunky prices, though each is for two to three people and comes with sides: a whole black leg chicken with roast potatoes and green salad for £42; a lamb shoulder with aubergine caviar, runner beans and jus for £58.
We opted instead for all the smaller plates, priced at between £6.50 and £10.50: those tomatoes, dribbled with glugs of peppery olive oil, that classic pâté en croûte, topped by its fat ribbon of savoury jelly the colour of amber, with pickles to cut through it all. There were artichokes “à la grecque”, simmered in a peppercorn-spiked liquor of white wine, olive oil and lemon juice with nutty beans dressed in a coriander pesto. Razor clams were cooked, chopped and returned to their shell with wild mushrooms and spinach, then doused in a reduced liquor of spinach and garlic, the better to be swiped away with chunks of baguette. The nearest thing to exotica was a carpaccio of salt-cured cod, with blackberries and fragments of seeded cracker.
We finished with a raspberry mille-feuille, with raspberry sorbet made with the crispest of caramelised pastry, and the finest of fruit. It was so pretty it seemed a shame to put a spoon through it, though not for long. Roasted apricots with apricot ice-cream and ricotta came with granola which didn’t quite convince me that breakfast cereal belongs with lunch. See? It’s still possible to be positive and critical.
You will want to know what eating here is like. Tables have been removed to enforce the necessary social distancing and that bar really is hefty, making well-spaced counter dining an option. All waiters wear masks, and there’s no paper because both the food menu and the short wine list are on blackboards. In good weather there is that space outside. It has been thought through.
Some suggest that the reopening of restaurants is too risky; that the low paid will be forced to work against their will. There will always be terrible employers, just as there were before Covid-19. But everyone I’ve spoken to so far has expressed enthusiasm about returning to work. In the end it comes down to a risk assessment and, even as a 50-plus male carrying enough extra timber to make a Viking long boat, the risk – both to myself and to others – seems reasonable. There is a balance to be struck between the health impacts of the virus and those of lockdown. Right now, that balance leans towards restaurants being open, though it may change. I want the restaurant sector to survive. That means going to them. For now, that’s what I shall do. I’ll keep my fingers crossed they’re all as comely as Pique-Nique.
News bites
The charity Hospitality Action has launched an innovative ‘invisible chips’ campaign to raise funds for people in the restaurant business, suffering financially because of the current crisis. The campaign, fronted by Fred Sirieix, Heston Blumenthal and Tom Kerridge, invites diners to add a portion of fat-free, calorie-free, non-existent chips to their order, with all proceeds going to the charity. BrewDog is among the first companies to sign up, putting invisible chips on their menu at £3.95. Those who are not yet going out to eat but wish to contribute, and restaurants who want to sign up to the campaign, can do so at invisiblechips.org.uk.
The Japanese noodle restaurant group Shoryu Ramen has launched the DIY Shoryu Ramen Kit, available for delivery across much of the UK. Each kit, which serves two, contains 12-hour tonkotsu soup, noodles and bbq pork belly, alongside ginger, spring onions and mushrooms, as well as detailed instructions. It costs £20 and is available to order from japancentre.com.
For the same price you can get the Summertime Picnic Pack from the Cheddar Gorge Cheese Company. Each pack contains a hunk of their cave-matured traditional cheddar, another flavoured with cider, garlic and chives, plus Cornish sea salt biscuits, cheese straws, red onion marmalade and chilli jam. For sake of doubt you do not need to go on a picnic to eat this. You can also eat it at home. Order from cheddaronline.co.uk.
Jay Rayner will be performing his live show, My Last Supper, at the Drive-In London, Enfield on Saturday 25 July. For tickets visit kxtickets.com
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
