On Menus

This is one of my most treasured possessions. It is a folio called London À La Carte by Caroline Conran, published in 1967 by Habitat. Essentially it is a sheaf of A3 facsimile reproductions of the most interesting and influential restaurants in the capital at the time, with a couple of signature recipes on the back. The design ranges from the gorgeously illustrative (I think only Bibendum still echoes this currently, and Quo Vadis in monochrome) to the naïve (the mimeographed typewritten chinese list on yellow sugar paper), though all are utterly transporting – I imagine the 60s restaurant scene, so vividly captured in The Spaghetti Tree: La Terraza, Alvaro, for example. I paid an absolutely monstrous amount of money for it, however there is presently a copy on ABE available for £18, and I recommend it hugely to anyone interested in London restaurant history.

Over the last five years I’ve rewritten the menus daily, every day. Often changes will be small – on Friday none of the expected peas arrived from Italy, but the first broad beans did, and so they went on the menu instead. On Tuesday we sold the last of the beautiful organic Lincolnshire quail, with their rich flesh, dark as partridge, and so portioned up the generous, fatty loin of one of Mary Holbrook’s fabulous English Lop. Jorge sent from Swaledale a few more quail yesterday, just as the pork finished. Weekend saved.

Along the way there have been more major revisions. My first menu was as follows:

It took me a little while to find on an old hard drive, probably longer than it took me to clumsily layout on MS Word in the first place.  Coffee has not changed price since we opened, possibly due to the tenacity of our house roaster, Jack Coleman, who has barely raised his prices for this wildly fluctuating commodity since we switched from Monmouth a couple of months in. Prices are very low, especially recalling the generosity of the portion sizes. This is in large part because no one had explained to me the concept of VAT, nor that I had to pay it. Luckily I was still in the VAT free opening window offered to small businesses when I found out, and all was rectified in time. When looking over the early days in retrospect I’m far more likely to laugh at my huge mistakes, and reserve my cringing embarrassment for anything which at the time I celebrated as a great success – these were the far more profound examples of my naivety. Perhaps I’ll return to these later.

The current dinner menu looks like this:

I’m very fond of this menu. I’ve worked with a couple of designers I really admire on it. Initially I approached Inventory Studio, then headed up by founders David Lane and Rob Boon. David has since left to found his beautiful art & food journal, The Gourmand, to which I’m an avid subscriber. They put together some lovely A5 format menus, which were bound to pretty enamelled plates of steel with hair bands. Initially these felt and looked magnificent, but as is often the way the place grew around them, and they started to feel somewhat dwarfed by the new scale of the room, which had by that point been gutted, re-floored, paneled, and re-furnished. I often wonder whether I’m not just terribly fickle and easily bored, but in the new surroundings they no longer felt appropriate. I therefore re-designed the menu with the help of Peter Karageorgevich, an amazing designer and an old friend, who’d produced our pretty chandelier-referencing logo. We worked up something on A4 card, dishes on the front, wine list on the back. This was important to me as I hated presenting one list for the table to share. For many of our guests, especially those working for the profusion of wine merchants in the neighbourhood, picking an interesting bottle together was as important as selecting what they were going to eat, and only offering one list seemed undemocratic, and not companionable. I also liked how the new menu format removed puddings to a separate card, with all the brandies, sweet wines and other treats listed alongside. This I picked up from Quo Vadis – whenever I think I’m full, I’m presented with a menu of delicious things I haven’t yet seen, and consequently always find room for one of Jeremy’s fabulous puds. Some guests note that they like to know what’s for pudding while constructing their first and second courses, however they only have to ask, and desert cards are immediately presented.

Menu writing is my greatest preoccupation. I want the dishes that we conceive, cook, plate and serve to be considered, delicious & inspiring. I don’t place food on the level of fine art in my mental taxonomy, but I do believe that cooking has the capacity for artistry, and can withstand a certain amount of determined and determining investment of thought before collapsing into pretension. I believe the more I put into my menus, the more our guests will get out. Sometimes I get emails from guests, or comments on Opentable, suggesting that our food is too esoteric, and that what they’d love to see on our menu is steak and chips. I think I’d probably love to see steak and chips on any menu, but can’t for the life of me remember the last time I actually ate it. In fact I can only recall two occasions on which I’ve eaten steak and chips – once at St John, when I was about 13 (it was actually forerib, roast potatoes & horseradish), and once again at 32 Great Queen Street, when I was about 21 (this time the forerib with triple cooked chips and Tom N-D’s ethereal Béarnaise). Both times it was entirely related to the quality of Tom Jones’ wonderful Hereford beef, not the happy but pedestrian marriage of savoury meat with crispy spuds and sauce. I know I’ve eaten it many more times that that, but cannot recall a single one. In the same way, I vividly recall my first oyster, but not my last. It is our job to cook food people want to eat; however it is also our job to create the possibility of memorable experiences, and it is for this reason we wage quiet war against cliché, and focus on giving our guests what we believe they will love, not what we second-guess they might like.

We have just updated our breakfast menu for summer. Breakfast is one of our hardest services as a restaurant. To put this into the context of Brunswick House, we have a small kitchen, with 2 or 3 chefs working at any one time. During a busy evening shift, a full dining room and a large private dinner in the house, we’re serving around 200 guests dinner, with many more ordering informally from the bar menu. Preparation for this starts at 7am. By 11.30am we pause to set up for lunch. From 3pm we have a two and a half hour prep window before pre-service briefing at 5.30pm, then dinner. Alongside this, we open from 9.30am for breakfast. This is partly because Lascco opens then, and since we share the building, we feel we should be open too, to offer Lassco’s clients a coffee, and the rest of Vauxhall a marvelous space in which to escape the traffic and noise. Our goal is therefore to offer the most delicious food we are able to, under circumstances, those being a small kitchen, and a huge workload. We are also cognizant of the fact that most guests don’t want to wait more than 10 minutes for an order of toast that they know would only take them a few minutes at home.

Most popular breakfast dishes are short order, cooked from scratch. These are oddly enough the hardest dishes for a restaurant kitchen like ours to produce. We have a decent amount of workspace, but most of it is just gleaming stainless steel counter-top. We have a relatively small amount of cooking space – a flat top range and a 6-burner, which is sufficient, but realistically gives us room to fry two eggs at a time. You can imagine how fraught a Saturday morning, with 20 orders for fried eggs on toast on the rail, guests waiting 40 minutes as a result, and the kitchen thoroughly in the weeds before we’ve even started getting ready for lunch, feels.

On top of this I have a slight financial discomfort with breakfast menus. Waitrose, across the road, now sell Clarence Court Burford Brown eggs, and have for a while been stocking Gail’s excellent (by supermarket standards) sourdough. For 6 pounds you can by enough eggs and bread to feed a large family fried eggs on toast. Taking into account the addition of VAT, our enormous fixed costs such as the rent of this beautiful old space, and the wages of the many staff involved in their preparation and service, there’s no way I can serve Clarence Court eggs on sourdough toast and feel like I’m providing value. Nor do I feel like such an apparently simple dish, but one that nevertheless also requires total attention to get right, is something that we as a restaurant could ever do better than a home cook.

The solution to my mind was to complicate rather than simplify. If my dilemma came from the fact that I felt uncomfortable charging high prices for speedy simple dishes, perhaps the solution was to invest more time in the preparation? Charles and I sat down a month ago with all this weighing on us, and wrote up a menu of dishes we’d love to eat first thing, but that we wouldn’t be bothered, or able to prepare at home. The result is as follows:

Some dishes seem obvious. Toasted Brickhouse sourdough, butter and marmalade are elevated by the fact we culture and churn our own butter, and make are own marmalade, and both are the most delicious I’ve ever tasted. Our Bircher Muesli is steeped in cultured yogurt, apple and juice overnight, to give it perfect consistency, and served with gingery poached rhubarb on top. My favourite is the Lardy Cake. This was somewhat inspired by James Lowe’s wonderful honey and smoked bacon canelé at Lyle’s, and also by something unmentionable involving toasted Lardy Cake, melted cheese and spiced plums that Jeremy Lee once did to me one Christmas after we’d over-indulged somewhat. Charles and I developed the recipe using Elizabeth David’s peerless English Bread And Yeast Cookery, which contains many variations of traditional yeast-leavened fruit breads, using lard we’d rendered and smoked from one of Mary Holbrook’s magnificent English Lop. The slice of baked Lardy Cake, folded through with fat, sultanas, apricots, prunes, nutmeg, ginger, cinnamon & brown sugar is toasted to order, then dolloped with soured cream and drizzled with golden syrup. It has the crispy, crunchy, fluffy, chewy, salty, sweet, syrupy & savoury quality of that magnificent American monolith Pancakes, Maple & Bacon, but with a bit of added English oomph.

Grilled Lardy Cake, Syrup & Soured Cream

Many guests were disappointed to come in over the weekend and find we had replaced the excellent fried eggs on toast that were formerly on the menu. I write this as an apology, and explanation, and a reassurance that we are reconsidering, and you may soon see their return, though perhaps in a different guise. This re-conception was very much done with our guests in mind. We wanted to offer them something quicker, more delicious, more considered, more unusual, and a list which offered better value, as we do with all menu development. I’m delighted to see how popular some plates have already been; the buttery breakfast muffin, stuffed full of pressed Old Spot ham hock and molten Coolea cheese, has been particularly successful, so much so that it now features on the bar menu, to enable guests to keep ordering through the afternoon, should their day start at a more relaxed pace.

As always, I welcome feedback on our development and changes. I write this to reassure that it isn’t mere caprice, and that there's a methodology behind the apparent inconsistency. Do let me know what you think.

Toasted Ginger Bread & Poached Plum