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'This is food that hugs you and puts a woolly scarf around your neck'
In the frenzied search for the newest, the wildest, the farthest-out culinary rushes, it's easy to forget simple pleasures. The mashed potato that's served at this deceptively low-key newcomer is one of the simplest. It's also one of the most voluptuous: I've been dreaming about it ever since, waking up with the kind of sigh of longing I once reserved for dark-haired, tattooed rock gods.
The slightly smoky flesh of baked potatoes is scooped out and passed through a ricer until entirely smooth, then whipped with what tastes like appalling amounts of good butter. I'm guessing here: it could, of course, be made using that molecular process whereby butter isn't used at all and it's all diastatic malt powder, but somehow I doubt it. It's not a poncey purée or ambitious aligot; it's just mash, as dense and stiff as the stuff they'd serve at school dinners, if school dinners were catered by a deity. The humble spud is allowed to shine, to show that it's every bit as sexy as the gussied-up parvenus.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. This handsome restaurant is a collaboration between Angela Hartnett, her partner Neil Borthwick and the chaps behind true Brit mini-chain, Canteen. You enter via a bar with a subfusc, almost Edward Hopper-ish quality, where the cocktails are justifiably billed as "sharpeners" – my Dr Henderson The Younger, spiky with the recherché flavours of Punt e Mes and Fernet Branca, is about as sharp as it gets. The room then spreads out dramatically: bustling open kitchen; vast skylight offering a moody vista of blank-eyed buildings and fire escapes; low, sludge-green banquettes; and mid-century-modern lamps. Design is studiedly undesigny: only the beautiful, jewel-coloured endpaper pattern on the menu gives a hint as to the seriousness of intent. That, and the acquisition for the launch of FOH boss Thomas Blythe, one of the capital's most accomplished workers of a room.
I've been a couple of times now, and each time the menu is different, but intensely seasonal. There might be quail, juicy and with a seductive whiff of bonfire from the grill, with a scattering of toasted hazelnuts and a wibbly square of foie gras: the culinary equivalent of storming through rustling golden leaves, but without the nasty surprises. Borthwick is fond of gentle pickling: a truffle-soft tranche of mackerel, for instance, is given real glamour by its fennel, orange and horseradish sidekicks. I've eaten from the sensibly-priced lunch menu, too (£18 for two courses, £22 for three): wood pigeon, its innate earthiness blasted up a few notches with sticky beetroot and more hazelnuts; rosy collops of lamb neck, nutty barley and a soothing onion purée. This is food that hugs you and puts a woolly scarf around your neck.
If I were to try to find a word to sum up Merchants Tavern, it would be confidence. The confidence to accessorise a generous hunk of pork belly with little more than roast cauliflower and savoy cabbage, sophistication coming from an almost throwaway blob of the most intense, bitter grapefruit purée. The confidence to put a cheese and ham toastie on the bar menu at the same time as pig's head "kremeski" (sic) with tarragon mayonnaise. (But oh my what a toastie: ripe, fruity, brine-washed ogleshield oozing like raclette all over glorious sourdough.) The confidence to let vegetables shine, perhaps a hangover from Borthwick's time spent with Michel Bras, the French guru of veg, but with none of the tortured grandstanding that can come with this kind of CV. To serve pork neck as a meal for two, with what looks like a bubbling vat of toasty cauliflower cheese but, confusingly, is girolles persillade, is a piece of theatre that draws envious stares from every other diner in the room. And, of course, to dish up a small saucepan of bloody good mash when everyone else is doing triple-fried chips rammed into flowerpots. This is a restaurant with the chops not to have to try too hard. Sheer class.
• Merchants Tavern 36 Charlotte Road, London EC2, 020-7060 5335. Open lunch, Tues-Sun, noon-3pm (4pm Sun); dinner, Tues-Sat, 6-11pm. About £40 a head plus drinks and service.
Food 7/10
Atmosphere 8/10
Value for money 7/10
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