I DON'T know what it says about their respective universities,
but Oxford has always been better served with restaurants than Cambridge. This was something for which I was always pretty grateful during my three years' stint, as who,wouldn't be, suffering night after night the Florida cocktail followed by Chicken a la King or other such examples of can-opener cuisine with which LMFI sought to lure us?
Admittedly the Quat' Saisons, even in its first, modest, incarnation in Summertown, wasn't really an alternative, any more than was the Elizabeth. But at the Sorbonne's lunchtime Casse-Croute I've eaten the best onion tart outside Alsace. My extra-college eating was, admittedly, subsidised by a waitressing job at Clement's, just over Magdalen bridge (now a wine bar-ish affair called Fellows which a no doubt misplaced nostalgia prevents me from visiting) but even the stringencies of grant-cheque budgeting allowed for regular fill-ups at Brown's or Munchy Munchy.
Since my time, things have smartened up a bit. Gee's, once the Victorian- conservatoried florist in the Banbury road, became, if only for a while, Oxford's answer to Eleven Park Walk. Now, as Le Petit Blanc,, it is the repository for even headier culinary ambitions (reported on in these pages a couple of years back), with Bruno Loubet installed in the kitchens. The price of dinner here, however, makes it inaccessible to any other than latter day Sebastian Flytes. The less profligate can always do their grown-up eating round the corner, at 15 North Parade, once the Russian bookshop and now, under its second ownership, a neatly planned, ear- nest but not too forbidding little res- taurant, just diagonally opposite an old haunt of mine, the long-Standing and char- mingly awful Luna Caprese.
The local paper's write-up stuck to its window pronounces 15 North Parade to be definitely more gown than town, but over- heard snippets of conversation are more likely to be about what a fool McPhee made at last night's faculty meeting than an impending essay crisis or what to wear to the Rock Soc Bop. I can't imagine 15 North Parade being a favourite among undergraduates, which, of course, makes it an ideal place to take visiting parents.
The restaurant operates on the prix-fixe
principle. Lunch, with a choice of four or five dishes per course, is a reasonable £10.75 for two, a pound more for three courses; dinner is always three courses, with a more extensive selection, at £17.95; there are modest concessions to vegeta- rians on both menus.
We tried it one Sunday lunchtime a couple of weeks back. There isn't any special Sunday lunch, which may be a mistake, but the risotto I started with was proper risotto: a mound of mushroom- darkened rice, gloriously sticky and ben mantecato, though I'd rather the parme- sanning had been left to me than the chef. The soup of the day was a routine French onion, somewhat lacking in depth.
For the main course we went for the grilled marinated chicken breast with a red wine sauce and the lamb kidneys with a grain mustard sauce. Apart from the fact that the sauce that came with the chicken tasted mustardier than that which came with the kidneys, which in turn tasted winier than the sauce which came with the chicken, both were on the pleasing side of acceptable. What stops me from coming forward with any adjectives that register a greater degree of excitement was the fact that the sauce on the kidneys had the consistency of a fairly runny reduction, so runny in fact that I couldn't get any of the sauce to stick to the kidneys and the choice was between a mouthful of kidney or a mouthful of sauce. Both were good, but I'd have preferred them. together. The prob- lem with the chicken was that its marinade had dyed the flesh a rebarbative heart- disease purple. I'm all for lessening the emphasis on presentation, but not this way.
The lemon tart with which we ended had a slightly unexpected custardy creaminess of texture, but which was well balanced by its fruity sharpness. The wine list was not as reasonably priced as the food, but was thoughtfully selected. The half bottle of Fleurie (at £6.25) was not the best I've had, but pleasant enough. And this just about sums up the restaurant as a whole. Okay for whiling away a lunchtime with parents, if they're paying, but not worth blowing the grant-cheque on.
15 North Parade, Oxford. Tel: 0865
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