La Poule au Pot
NO ONE, above all a critic, likes to admit to being vulnerable to the vagaries of fash- ion. The particularity of our opinions is, to be vulgar, our livelihood; tastes may change but our palates have, decidedly and incor- ruptibly, to be our own. Quite so, quite so. But, for all that, only restaurants which exist can be written about; even in our post- postmodern age the journalist's art must limit itself to reflecting reality. We can thus satisfy ourselves that we present the fashion rather than follow it.
The fashion now, it cannot have escaped your notice, is for what is tagged, alternate- ly, New Wave Italian or Neo-Mediter- ranean food. True, it just so happens — as indeed it must happen only rarely — that what is fashionable is actually what is good (why, you could choose from any modish menu and like what you eat without even being apprised beforehand that it was stylish so to do). However sincere one's rel- ish for char-grilled baby squid with chillis or, as it may be, angelhair pasta with scal- lops and sun-dried tomatoes, believe me that when the menus come to be rewritten they'll all seem as tired as yesterday's monkfish in a duo of pepper sauces.
Even though I know this to be true I feel some bitterness about it. For this is the food I love. In fact, and I should be ashamed to think, let alone admit, this, I feel resentful that this kind of cooking became fashionable in the first place. A wholesale appropriation of one's personal taste — even if that's not quite how it is is threatening rather than complimentary. It's like finding the clothes one has always worn are suddenly the height of fashion. It's not just that it's an imposition, or feels like one, but that one's originality is discon- certingly cast in doubt.
Even to notice, let alone to mind, is self- indulgent, but it is annoying to be fed up to the eye-teeth with the sort of stuff one thought one would never lose an appetite for. You see, for all my protestations, I have begun to sag, just slightly, when faced with yet another photofit menu. Constant Eater found herself looking around, not for what's new, but for what's old.
I can't remember the time I last went to a French restaurant, let alone wrote about one. I mean a proper French restaurant, like the ones I was taken to as a child. La Poule au Pot, in Pimlico, is not so much of this genre but, for me, epitomises it. My childhood memory of the place isn't acute enough to register whether it has changed much over the years, but I would suspect not. It has a settled and unmade-over look: grainy, unpolished floorboards underfoot; a swag of foliage and wicker basketry on high; walls, where not brick, a vinegar-and- brown-paper tan; and on the tables, on top of the sheets of white cotton, squares of brown paper. Marc Faillat is still running the show, as he has since it opened in 1962, and they've still got the same man in the kitchen. I had wondered, since the food had got so much better everywhere else in the meantime, whether it would still seem as strikingly good. But La Poule au Pot is still doing some of the best French food, the sort of food it's getting difficult to find these days even in France, where standards are actually slipping faster than ours areris- ing. I risk further offending the French by informing them that the chef is not even a Frenchman, but a Scot by the name of James Greer.
I was tempted to get thoroughly into the nostalgic swing of things by ordering my childhood favourite, esca►gots, but went instead for something a bit more modeme: a designer-leaf salad with roast leeks and Jerusalem artichokes. These were not so much roasted as shredded and deep fried, so that on top of the the oil-slicked salad lay a tangle of hot sweet chips like strings of rafia.
Quiche au gruyere was not the solid card- boardy triangle usually going under that name, but an only-just-set and deliciously quivering wedge of cheesy egg custard sit- ting on pastry crisp and buttery. Caneton r6ti a !'orange, which is just the sort of thing to order here, was perfect: the flesh pink, the sauce a thick and soupy reduction of meat juices made astringent, not sweet- ened, by the addition of orange. The poule au pot itself of course I had to have, though regrettably there was too much of it even for me to finish. I ended with a creme bridge, a capacious terracotta bowl of it and the best I've ever had.
With a bottle of lovely pink scented water (I have something of a faiblesse for musty Provençal rosé), a lot of water, a couple of drinks before and coffee after- wards, the bill for dinner for two of us, including their 121/2 per cent service charge, came to £80.
La Poule au Pot, 231 Ebury St, London SW1; tel:• 071 730 7763
Nigella Lawson
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