Don't follow the herd
Dominic Prince FT en days ago I went to one of London's finest restaurants, the Lahore in Whitechapel. The place was packed with hundreds of eager punters. There were bankers from the City, large families of Asians, Essex chavs. We were served plate after plate, piled high with spiced fodder from a kitchen with a glass facade enabling you to see the troops of cooks preparing kebabs piled on More e-numbers, anyone?'
coals, hundreds of pieces of dough turning into breads in a brick oven, and huge vats of bubbling chicken and lamb curries, vegetable concoctions and gigantic pans of rice.
For those in the know, the Lahore is an institution. It was started by the Siddique family in the late 1960s and has thrived ever since. Last year they extended the premises so that, with a push, they can serve over 400 at one service, and they do from midday until the early hours of the morning. The bill for four of us came to £70. We recently held my daughter's ninth birthday party there and managed to feed 18 people for £170. It leaves you asking, how do they do it?
The answer is, the Lahore doesn't have a celebrity chef and they don't have to fork out huge sums to get a restaurant PR person to promote them. It's a family-run business with a large and varied clientele.
According to Harden's restaurant guides, more restaurants than ever opened in London last year. A lot were backed by City money looking for a home and hoping for a return, and the quickest way to do that is to get a celebrity chef endorsement. How often does Gordon Ramsay cook in his restaurants? Has he ever cooked in one of his pubs? He's just announced that he wants to open another ten pub outlets; will he cook in any of them? Aren't we just all buying into club Gordon? I've lost count of how many restaurants Marco Pierre White has been involved in that have closed down.
The one thing that Ramsay, Pierre White and the legion of other so-called celebrity chefs is good at is promoting themselves and their restaurants. The hype and the flannel is a part of the corporate restaurant culture, but there are small family-run restaurants mostly unsung and not tainted by the restaurant PR machine.
St Gennaro, a pizzeria, is in a run-down parade of shops at the wrong end of Battersea Park Road. It's run by a group of Neapolitans who have been at it for years. Until recently they didn't accept credit cards — it's that type of place. The dough is made on the premises from Campagna flour, the fresh buffalo mozzarella jets in from Naples twice a week and the tomatoes are from the same area. The pizzas are of course baked to order and they taste out of this world. The service is occasionally grumpy but the Italians who flock there don't seem to mind.
Andrew Edmunds is a picture dealer based in Soho who started a restaurant (Andrew Edmunds) in the premises next door to his gallery years ago. People do complain that the service is slovenly and often abrupt but there are rarely complaints about the food which is sourced, prepared and cooked with a passion. According to my friend Martin Lam, Andrew Edmunds's restaurant made its first entry into the Good Food Guide in the 2008 edition. For those in the know, it is a crime that it had not appeared earlier.
Martin Lam opened Ransome's Dock restaurant in Battersea with his wife Vanessa 15 years ago. It has one of the (acknowledged) best wine lists in London. The couple are scrupulous in buying their ingredients. When the restaurant needs a lick of paint, they do it themselves. Their daughter used to make the chocolate truffles. Eating at their restaurant is a pleasurable, no-risk affair. The food has never failed me, the wine is always superb. But on their doorstep there is a pretender. The Butcher & Grill was started with the backing of one of Michael Heseltine's partners in his Haymarket publishing venture. Much fanfare and PR activity followed the launch. The idea is good. The meat comes from a Sussex farm that the investor owns and the Butcher & Grill has 'chain restaurant potential' written all over it. The flaw is that it is nowhere near as good as Ransome's Dock, the family-run restaurant 50 yards away.
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