The Don, 20 St Swithin’s Lane, London EC4N 8AD. Starters £14.50–£19.50, mains £22.50–£47.50, desserts £11.50–£12.50, wines from £35
The Don in London’s Square Mile is a chilly restaurant. It’s not simply that on this grey November lunchtime, the vent to our left is pumping frigid air into the room, as if they failed to notice the clocks went back weeks ago. It’s also the hard-lined space with the slab-like picture windows looking out on to St Swithin’s Lane. It’s the parquet and the bright lights, the hefty chairs upholstered in a frosty shade of cadet blue, and the desperate attempt to soften everything with a large fern imprint on a taupe wall. The tables are set just far enough apart so diners can plot against their rivals and mutter “your shout or mine” at each other without being overheard. It feels like an overworked TV production designer’s idea of a City restaurant, from which at any moment every stick of furniture could be removed, along with the bar. Then it could become another much-needed commercial property sales office, as if nature were healing.
The expectation was for something much warmer, because the Don is deep-marinated in the cosy glow of history. The building in which it is located was acquired in 1805 by George Sandeman, who made it the headquarters for his eponymous wine merchants. Barrels filled with port and much else were stored and matured in the brick-lined vaults below, right up until the 1960s, and those subterranean spaces are now a set of private dining rooms, much prized by City firms for dinners where things must be discussed and suitors must be entertained. Accordingly, if you crave a huge wine list full of big-shouldered classics, made with as much human intervention as possible, this is the place for you. It is unsurprisingly strong on ports and sherries. These are all encouraging things, even if the pricing isn’t always.
Add to this the recent involvement of Rowley Leigh, part of that generation of book-smart cooks who expressed their enthusiasm for the world beyond Britain through a deep love of demi-glace and well-garnished hors d’oeuvres. In the 70s and 80s, he cooked at both Le Gavroche and Joe Allen. At one point, the Roux brothers installed him as the head chef at the long gone Poulbot, just a 100m or so away from the Don. Later, he opened Kensington Place, where he discovered that minted pea purée goes perfectly with scallops, for which we should thank him.
A couple of decades later at Le Café Anglais, he served mortadella with celeriac remoulade and kipper pâté with soft-boiled eggs. Best of all was a warm set parmesan “custard” with toast soldiers smeared with salted anchovy, a profound eggy something on a plate, only for adults. He did comfort food, but made it classy.
Now he has overseen the new menu here and it includes, among the starters, a classic Leigh dish: eggs “en meurette”, which means expertly poached and trimmed and plonked on a slab of toast with enough structural integrity to soak up the drenching in a glossy red wine sauce thick with lardons. It’s the sort of luxurious and comforting old-fashioned dish guaranteed to make those of us who like to drool over Robert Carrier cookbooks just before bed, very happy. If only everything was this good. Too often, it feels as if the kitchen is still working its way through the manual Leigh left behind. That might have been OK if lunch was a steal, but it’s not OK when starters are in the mid-to-high teens and mains are mostly above £30, even allowing for the limited choice two-course lunch menu for £35.
Another starter is vitello tonnato. Lengthy experience breeds expectation, which in this case means the anticipation of a plate fully covered by folds of thinly sliced, cold roast veal, like it’s a well-made bed. It should then be generously anointed with a blitzed tuna sauce. Here it is four lonely lozenges of meat just crying out for the word “meagre”, each painted with just enough tuna sauce to reach the edges, then dotted with capers and striped by one anchovy. Afterwards I looked back at the press image I had been sent. There, it was a brown, salted anchovy, which makes sense because that’s also an ingredient to the sauce. Here it’s the strident vinegar-marinated boquerones. This is not about salted anchovies being right. It’s about them being better.
There’s a similar issue with a dish of chilli-marinated partridge, which has an exceedingly well-mannered heat as if it was made for people who don’t much like chilli. Admittedly, small birds like partridges are tricky to cook, but for £32.50 you’d hope they would have nailed it. Here, it’s tough and tensed like it led too active a life, and it lies on a succotash, the famed Louisiana sweetcorn stew, which is so heavy on butter beans it’s oddly drying. A piece of hake on a pile of borlotti beans is, like the bird, overcooked, but at least it comes with a prawn sauce in which roasted shell and head are allowed their moment.
The cooking is just terribly uneven, an issue which continues into dessert. A good rum baba is hard to make. The enriched sponge or savarin must have an ineffable lightness. Eating one should bring to mind that scene in Pixar’s Up! with the house blowing away on the breeze, only now tied to rum babas rather than balloons. It demands that sort of comedy lightness. And yet it must also be structured enough to soak up the boozy syrup, so that the spoon doesn’t so much slip through it as slurp through it. This one looks the part. It stands proud and golden. And it does soak up syrup. But it’s as dense and heavy as pappy white bread. It goes unfinished, a phrase I have never before written about a rum baba. A pear poached in red wine also looks right. There are whorls of Chantilly, topped with sprigs of micro herbs of the sort the late great Charles Campion called “dessert parsley”. But the pear just needed a few minutes more in the poaching liquor. Happily, there are still-warm sugar-crusted beignet on the side. The deep-fat fryer always provides.
These problems aren’t fatal. They won’t distract you from talking shop or brooding over Jane Street’s latest results. But it may make you squint at a bill for £160 for three courses without wine, and wonder just what happened – both here on this hefty, linen-clad table, and to Rowley Leigh’s generous touch in the kitchen. It’s completely missing in action, and that’s quite the disappointment.
News bites
Chef George Barson, who cooked at Kitty Fisher’s and Cora Pearl in London before joining the Beckford Canteen in Bath, has moved on again. He has joined the regenerative Higher Farm near Castle Cary in Somerset. Currently, Higher Farm is home to the daytime Farm Caff which serves a breakfast and lunch menu, but they are planning a new restaurant with an evening service for 2025 (higher-farm.co.uk).
Sam Pullan and his team at the Empire Café in Leeds are taking over a currently closed boozer just off the city’s Burley Road. Pullan says he wants the Highland, which reopens in March, to serve food which has ‘a nod to Northern pub culture where you drink 10 pints of bitter and mop it up with ham or beef sandwiches from the bar and a pickled egg’. Doubtless, he also wants people to drink responsibly. There will, he says, be a charcoal-fired oven for whole cuts of meat, alongside a seafood offering and small plates (empirecafeleeds.co.uk).
And for the final newsbite of 2024, let me remind you of a charity close to my heart: The Food Chain, which gives vital nutritional advice and support to people with HIV, and of which I am proud to be a patron. They do important, life saving work, and are always in need of funds. You can donate here.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Instagram @jayrayner1
