READER, I lied to you. I should be writing about
L'Odeon as promised, but I got way- laid — and not by another restaurant but by a pub. Pub food, for all the devotion paid it by British Tourist Authority guides, is something that is rarely worth writing about. Perhaps it's because it's sold in places where the emphasis is on everything but the food: the beer, the juke-boxes, the beeping video machinery conspire to marginalise it, even in that rare pill) where the culinary imagination extends further than a chill cabinet and a salamander.
In recent years, though, the pub-restau- rant has been somewhat rehabilitated. At worst that means high-street pubs have been turning themselves into Thai restau- rants in the evening — and a quite astonish- ing number of them have been doing that, not always unconvincingly — but at best it means the Eagle in Farringdon and the Lansdowne in Primrose Hill. The Anglesea Arms fits into the latter category, only it somehow surpasses it. It's a smaller place, for a start, and perhaps that means one mis- takenly presumes the ambition to have been more limited. But the surprise of coming across a quiet, wood-panelled room of a pub — fire burning in the grate, though I assure you the place is not twee — with a modern, open and bright kitchen off it, from which emanates cooking of the highest standard, is immensely gratifying. What With the Brackenbury just down the road and now this, the area is becoming, gastro- nomically speaking, quite the new W11.
Dan Evans, the chef and a former pro- tégé of Alastair Little, had, apparently, had his eye on the Anglesea Arms for some time. It was a genteel boozer, a remnant of an earlier era before this bit of back-street Hammermith had spruced up its stucco and the agents had divided it all into newly- named villages. After years of waiting, the licensee suddenly decided to sell; three months later, it is quietly refurbished after the relaxed style of the north London pubs Which were heavily Victorianised in the Eighties and stripped of their brassware and phoney bar mirrors again in the Nineties. I am not a pubby sort of person, far from it, but I like it here: there is no music and there are no machines.
Usually when this sort of thing opens up, it's good for what it is — for the area, for a pub and so on — but no more than that. Here, the food is straightforwardly excel- lent, no qualifiers needed. Even restaurants you'd never believe would buy their pota- toes peeled and sliced do so these days; here the chips are made on the premises and are the best in London. I mention this because it's no good if pubs just turn them- selves into trendy restaurants: they have to be good at pub food, too. Here this means a bar menu of hot dogs, chip butties, BLT, a few other sandwiches and posh varieties of nut and snack. The dog comes encased in baguette and so, I saw, did the chip butty. I have one reservation: there's no need, in west London, to call a chip sand- wich a chip butty, but if you do, it simply cannot come in a baguette. I rather feel you do need soft, uncrusty, white — but good white — bread.
The cooking itself is very Modern British (a couple of books were balancing on a kitchen shelf when I last went in: The River Café Cookbook and Simon Hopkinson's Roast Chicken and Other Stories) but we are not in pastiche country. Evans is a real tal- ent. Bruschetta with grilled vegetables and soft goat's cheese, for all that it might threaten to become a contemporary culinary cliché, exactly hit the spot; roast pork with apple sauce and cabbage was gratifyingly untricksy. I lusted after the roast beef — good and bloody with what looked to be a roast banana shallot, York- shire pudding and the rest — at Sunday lunch, but it had run out by the time I man- aged to sit down and put an order in. I'm glad to say, though, they are soon to take bookings for Sunday lunch.
The menu seems to change all the time and is not very long but pretty varied. Choucroute garnie, poached gammon with puréed peas, lox and rollmop with beetroot and a garlicky brandade, a whole buttery pile of it, delicately laced with curls of black truffles, have all been excellent. The beignets, which, I'm glad to say, seem to be a permanent fixture on the menu for pud- ding, are real beignets: butterscotch- coloured, fat, caterpillar-shaped tubes that are crisp with sugar without, soft and aro- matic within. These come with vanilla ice- cream and a proper caramel sauce, smoky and hard-hitting.
You can eat well here for around flO a head, but the only problem is that they haven't got it completely together yet. You can end up waiting a long time for your food. Still, I think they are beginning to get it under control now.
I'm sorry, but I can't even promise to make up for my sin of omission by report- ing on L'Odeon next time, having already got waylaid again, this time by Alastair Lit- tle's new joint in Lancaster Road. And it is wonderful: I've been eating very well indeed this past week.
Anglesea Arms, 35 Wingate Road, London W6; tel 0181 7491291.
Nigella Lawson
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