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The Greenhouse
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A CURIOUS inversion has taken place in culinary circles. People are eating home food out and restaurant food in. Any chef worth his toque pays homage to stews and roasts, braised oxtail and bread-and-butter pudding (or the Italian equivalents, brus- chetta, polenta, grainy beans and budino di semolina) but meanwhile home on the range, steamed-up dinner-party hostesses break their backs and their spirit as they wrestle with kaleidoscopic vegetable ter- rines, quenelles and ballotines of duck, pithiviers and towering confections that tremble, untouched, on the sideboard.
Of course, it never works out quite as it should. Home cooks do not usually have the kitchen or the staff needed for the hankered-after menu, and should anyway be dissuaded from such hankerings. And chefs will show off; the plainest dish can be ruined by the vulgar flourish and usually is. In chefese, good old-fashioned braised oxtail like granny used to make is likely to end up on your plate boned, reformed, stuffed with foie gras and raisins and given a gloss of beef glaze.
But not with Garry Rhodes it isn't. Gary Rhodes, you may remember, is the chef I trailed to Taunton. The one who, I learnt when I got there, had, a couple of days previously, packed up his le Creusets and made his way to the big city. Now, I've found him, with his de-vamped menu in the revamped Greenhouse, boiling bacon and splitting peas, doing everything that chefs have been saying they've been doing for ages but just haven't been. 'Real cooking,' he calls it. Real eating, I call it, and will soon have the expanded waistband to prove it.
Gary Rhodes is the Nigel Kennedy of the kitchen, young, with a punky haircut and a passion for his art, who you wouldn't automatically expect to find in the Green- house, which looks rather like the tea- room of a decorous residential seaside hotel (any moment you expect Uncle Giles to walk in) with its unmatched upright chairs and faux-Butterfield window- stencilling, its black-skirted, white-bloused and aproned waitresses and, by the by, no greenhouse or conservatory in sight.
The menu is, then, in the main British, though continental influences are not hid- den. They are more evident in the starters — a not altogether successful minestrone- ish soup but a rapturous, terracotta-
coloured red mullet one with rouille, car- paccio and foie gras. I have been twice now, and if you're planning on a starter, I'd advise the red mullet soup, the creamy, gruyere and leek flan or the poached egg with black pudding, sautéed potatoes and salad, an evocation of bygone days but a successful one.
But my prize goes to the main courses and the puddings, and I know that on further visits I'll do away with a starter altogether (after three courses I nearly burst in the taxi home) and wade straight into the boiled bacon and split peas, the calves' liver with bacon, mashed potatoes and onion gravy, turbot with fat cubes of bacon and rafia strips of savoy cabbage and sweet, golden caramelised onions or, my absolute favourite, the faggots in a thick, glossy, onion-sweet gravy, to be ordered with mashed potatoes and spinach. I saw other people eating, and lusted after, the confit of duck with basil-freckled slow- braised butter beans, so I think I shall have to try that next time. The chips looked gorgeous though judgment will have to be suspended until I feel up to forswearing the mashed potatoes.
For once, crème brill& comes to the table freshly brfileed, the sugar hotly blis- tered and burnt above the butter-yellow cream, but winners are the date-stuffed, aromatic sticky toffee pudding and a trifle, jellyless and the right temperature, not dragged out of some icy corner of a fridge. All I ask for future happiness is for Gary Rhodes to add a queen of puddings.
Wine list is short but to the point. On one outing I had a Hunter Valley Chardon- nay, which tasted of spring, and on another a decent but rather shallow Fleurie. On both occasions, two of us had • drinks before, three courses and coffee after- wards, and on one night the bill came to £53 and the other £75, without tip, and what's more on the more expensive night we'd drunk the cheaper wine. There is a marked difference in price between dishes (faggots are £6.50, turbot £8 more), and the fact that vegetables are not always included can alter the price considerably.
The Greenhouse, 27a Hays Mews, London WI; tel: 071 499 3331.
Nigella Lawson
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