It took a trip up North over Christmas to remind me that while London remains the principal battleground for competing restaurant concepts (for better or for worse), there are some places removed from the relentless fads and trends of the capital that have decided the key to success is nothing more ground-breaking than serving huge portions of nice, simple food and not charging the earth for it. Places, for example, like the White Lion in Great Longstone.
In the middle of this picture book Peak District village, the kind of place that could very easily be used as a set for a Jane Austen adaptation - and in fact probably has - the White Lion is a pub serving food. There's no sharing plates, no wacky soundtrack, no Asian-Jewish fusion, no exhaustive list of the heritage and birthplace and star sign of every last carrot or potato, just a menu of British pub classics plus a few international bits and pieces, a decent and inexpensive wine list, and a couple of guest ales. There are no surprises here, no clever twists, no foams, swirls or frills. And it's no surprise, breathing a metaphorical sigh of relief to have however briefly escaped the exhaustingly experimental London restaurant bubble, I enjoyed every bit of it.
I'm afraid I forgot to take very many pictures but actually, you can probably imagine what the food looked like anyway - as I said, this was straightforward, unpretentious stuff and all the better for it. Rustic hummus (£4.50) with warm pitta was buttery and well seasoned and just about the only homemade hummus outside of a Middle Eastern restaurant I've ever enjoyed - better for example than the stuff at Hummus Bros and they do very little else. My main course of gammon egg and chips was just that, a great thick piece of pork with some choice roast veg and skin-on chips, and a vast portion for £11.50.
I have never been able to resist a Sticky Toffee Pudding once I see it on a dessert menu, and this example was up there with the best of them - moist and rich and as addictive as Sticky Toffee Crack. It's also worth noting that the White Lion serve a £4 glass of Moscato dessert wine in a 125ml glass rather than the miserly 75ml measures more usual Down South.
Back in London now, faced with the usual bewildering array of new restaurants ready to test my wallet and my waistline (in 2012 more than ever restaurateurs just seem to be throwing everything they have at us and seeing which ones stick), Great Longstone seems like a world and a half away. But however impressive the pace and imagination of the capital, it's worth remembering that sometimes all that's needed for a good time is honesty, comfort, familiarity and great big bloody portions.
It was my friend Helen Graves who first brought the mysterious Yianni to the attention of London burger fans. An odd little enterprise, he travels across America for most of the year, collecting recipes, tips and traditions from as many different independent food outlets as he can, and then returns to the UK and attempts to recreate them, not from a permanent shop or even a hired kitchen, but a rickety looking mobile hotplate on wheels called the Meatwagon. The unpredictable nature and location of his appearances, not to mention the slavering reports from those lucky enough to try his Bobcat burger (Bobcat Bite, New Mexico) or the bacon cheeseburger (Hodad's, California) have created a kind of cultish following, one I'm sure that is completely deliberately encouraged by Yianni.
So it was with great anticipation that I arrived at the Florence pub in Herne Hill last night, where a hole had been cut in the garden fencing to allow the hatch from Yianni's van to slot in so neatly it's almost as if he was a permanent feature. Watching Yianni working with a critical eye was the pub dog Barksdale, who seemed to do very well that evening stealing scraps of hot dog and burger from generous drunken revellers. In the end, in fact, the dog did better than most people, as barely an hour after I arrived at 6pm Yianni had already run out of hotdogs. And bacon. And chilli. And then finally, a good hour and a half later, just as we'd managed to extract three plain cheeseburgers and a couple of Philly cheese steaks, those ran out too, leaving a good twenty or thirty people in the queue behind us hungry and really rather annoyed. I slunk past the fuming queue with my bounty and settled quietly in a corner of the pub to see what all the fuss was about.
Heavens above, they were good. Really, really good. Smashed beef patties soaked in slimy Kraft cheese sat inside golden, slightly toasted, soft buns criss-crossed with French's mustard and ketchup. The only token salad was a small handful of chopped iceberg to provide a bit of extra texture, just like you'd find in the States. The authenticity, in fact, was stunning - close your eyes against the grey British sky and you could have been in California, from the water steamed around the hotplate just before serving, to the lovely thick helping of American cheese. I didn't think any burger in the world could have been worth such fuss and wait, but this definitely was, and more. I was instantly and fiercely smitten.
The Philly cheese steak was, if not quite up there next to the burger, very confidently and competently constructed. The moist strips of steak were tender and tasty, and chopped fried vegetables were bound together with yet more lovely yellow "cheese". I've never been to Philadelphia, or for that matter ever had a Philly cheese steak from anywhere else, but given the detail lavished on the burger I'm willing to bet this is a pretty good recreation. It too disappeared in seconds, amongst a chorus of coos and moans.
Given the bother and wait and the fact that most of our original order was substituted, I was definitely not in the mood for charity, and that the Meatwagon burgers completely won me over with the first bite is a testament to Yianni's monumental achievement. His uncompromising attitude towards American tradition coupled with his frustrating stock management just, if anything, make the whole experience that much more authentic - even if the angry groups gathered around his rickety stall as the last Philly steaks went out may not have appreciated it. They can complain all they like, but nobody knows better than Yianni that they will be back, again and again and again. And by God, so will I.
9/10
Find out when the Meatwagon is appearing next by visiting his website.
Never let it be said I don't give restaurants a fair hearing. I am open-minded, even of temperament and balanced of judgement. I will gather all available information, weigh up the pros and cons and deliver an objective verdict which meticulously details the relevant points, whether good or bad. Usually. It's just that some places don't deserve a fair hearing. They need abusing, locking up and shutting down. They need barricading, quarantining and fire-bombing. They need 100ft-high billboards with giant spot lit lettering, carried over London by a phalanx of helicopters, reading "NEVER EVER HAVE LUNCH AT THE HAT AND FEATHERS". Ahem.
It may seem like I'm over-reacting, but picture the scene. Beer garden at the aforementioned Hat and Feathers pub in Clerkenwell, on a blazing hot summer's day. "Chef", sweating profusely onto the gas grille, has just produced what looks like a large grey turd from a shelf behind the counter and is pressing it into the heat. On closer inspection, the turd turns out to be a pre-cooked beefburger, solid with cold, congealed fat. After about three minutes of this activity, long enough to turn the outside black but presumably to still have a nice dense heart of lukewarm grease within, he proudly places the meat into a cold burger bun and pops a nice cold slice of Kraft cheese on top. A side order of undressed salad completes the dish.
I watched this horror unfold open-mouthed. Fortunately - oh, so fortunately - I had not yet selected my own food, so was able to cross the turdburger off the mental list and opted instead for "beef skewers". Ordering was another exercise in the bizarre and unpleasant. Approaching the bar, I couldn't help noticing the waitress had something in her mouth, and was staring wide-eyed at me as I advanced. Just as I began to speak, she reeled over and spat whatever it was (I'd really rather not ever know) into the nearest bin, then bounced back upright, saliva dribbling down her chin like an eager basset hound. It was, to say the least, off-putting, but I mumbled my order and escaped back to the beer garden before she turned into a werewolf.
The beef skewers were tiny, chewy and accompanied by a desperately depressing unseasoned green salad and bought-in pitta bread. With no accompanying sauce or moisture of any kind, it was a chore to eat even this meagre amount of food. Even worse though was a side order of chips, anaemic and flabby and reeking of old oil, the nastiest I think I've ever been served in London. A friend's salmon steak was tasteless, tiny, shrivelled and dripping in oil, and even came with a sneering £2 supplement.
And there we have probably the most awful lunch I've had anywhere for a very long time. If I was feeling even slightly charitable I suppose I could point out that £10 is not very much to spend on lunch, and the option of a beer garden will be attractive to some. But if any restaurant cares so little about their customers that they're shamelessly serving REHEATED BURGERS under the pretext of a "credit crunch" menu, then I don't have to be in the least bit generous in return. The Hat and Feathers is a cynical, incompetent establishment serving - almost literally - shit food. Please do yourself and the world a favour, and never ever go.
Reading this blog, and others like it (For We Are Legion), you may be forgiven for being under the impression that London is stuffed full of buzzy gastropubs, exciting ethnic grills and gleaming temples of gastronomy, and finding somewhere good to eat requires little to no effort at all. Sadly, although things have certainly improved in the last 10-15 years, crap restaurants are still very much a feature. I've ranted about Angus Steakhouses at length before, but there's still no excuse for them, or Bella Pasta, or All Bar One, or any of the other chain pubs and restaurants that blight our city. Once you've been to your local Slug & Lettuce and paid £8 for a horrible "vegetarian dipping platter" it becomes all too obvious why it's so difficult to get a table at the Anchor & Hope.
That said, there's a part of me that realises that many gastropubs, with their fancy Mediterranean ingredients and hawing clientele, aren't for everyone. Some are more elitist than others, certainly - I've always found the Eagle on Farringdon Road to be very accessible, whereas the Swan on Fetter Lane is basically a restaurant in a pub - but surely there's room for just a normal, cosy little boozer which serves decent food for people who quite rightly consider paying £15 for bangers and mash a bit too much? Step forward, the Punch Tavern, on Fleet Street.
Newly refurbished and relaunched, with a chef of refreshingly humble origins and a menu of heart-warmingly familiar British dishes, the Punch Tavern is a beautiful old building that very much deserved the attention. I was invited to lunch with a couple of other bloggers to try out their new menu, and got stuck in right away to a pint of Summer Lightning bitter and a plate of devilled chicken livers on toast.
For your £4.50 you get an impressively generous mound of what is admittedly a budget cut of offal, with a marvellously rich sauce. Not very "devilled" perhaps - could have done with a bit more of the hot stuff - but no major complaints.
My main course of duck roast was similarly generous for the measly £8.50 price point. A nice moist duck quarter, with creamed leeks and a good selection of roasted vegetables, my only complaint was with the soggy, greasy Yorkshire pud. I've said it before, and I'll say it again - if you can't do a proper Yorkshire pudding (and as far as I know, nobody in London can), then don't even try. There's a whole generation of people who have grown up believing a Yorkshire pud is a tiny cupcake-sized pillow of pastry, instead of the 15" square behemoths filled with gravy my gran used to serve as a starter. And it makes me sad.
Anyway, that aside, I can really recommend the Punch, and not just because I wasn't paying on this occasion. It's a friendly and accessible little boozer trying to serve fresh, hearty food without any pretensions towards trendy fads or eye-watering central-London tourist prices. It deserves to do very well.
Apologies for the lack of pictures - normal service will be resumed shortly
