“I blame you for all this,” I told my companion, the journalist and bookseller Ian Irvine, as the waiter poured two glasses of a perfectly chilled Pouilly Fumé Château de Tracy 2022.
“Blame me?” Irvine said, taking delivery of three scallops on their bed of hazelnuts, olive oil and delicately-chopped chorizo. “For what?”
When we first met through a mutual friend, I remind him, he was an editor on a national newspaper and I was an undistinguished sous chef in a canteen off the Holloway Road, having just abandoned a PhD on Oscar Wilde. Ian had been having trouble getting access to a reclusive songwriter who, by chance, I knew fairly well: his drummer was our washer-up.
“I was happy back then,” I told him. “We started at six in the morning. We got the orders out, cleaned up, went to the pub at half five, spent all our wages on drink, then got the last train home. It was perfect. Next thing I know, because of you, I find myself getting hired by the Telegraph, then having to manage conversations with sometimes headstrong characters like Nigel Farage, Charlotte Gainsbourg, James Brown, the entire cabinet of Zanu PF, and the current Archbishop of Canterbury.”
“I see,” says Irvine, with a sarcastic look. “That lot. How dreadful for you.”
“Whenever I write about a restaurant,” I tell him, “there’s a part of me that queasily reflects on how I could have devoted my life to something of practical use; something that might actually have benefitted people’s lives.”
“Such as?”
“Something involving… I don’t know… chiropody. Animal welfare. Goalkeeping. That kind of thing.”
My companion is right, of course: running into Irvine was one of the most fortunate collisions of my life. It’s just that, for some reason, I can’t help experiencing a sense of absurdity when mithering about a tepid lobster bisque or a hint of cork in the pinot grigio. Even before that head-butting incident in Liverpool, and a visit to the Terminus Nord in Paris where one member of staff threatened to call the police, my excursions as a restaurant reviewer had been intermittent and troubled. I’ve had my moments: I wrote the first review for a national publication of the Stockport restaurant When the Light Gets In, which a few weeks later was discovered by another London-based writer who had chanced upon “the most exciting food I have had in years” and emerged “starey-eyed [sic] and evangelical”.
My last excursion was for this newspaper when my favourite establishment, Banners, in Crouch End, closed last autumn. Since then, and even though N8’s best pub The Railway has, in a stroke of genius, recruited Banners’ Sri Lankan chef to launch “Roshan’s Kitchen”, St John’s Tavern has remained the only establishment in London which I could genuinely say I love. It’s not quite local: in the half-hour walk to Archway from Crouch End I couldn’t help noticing that, by the time I’d got here, the character of the area – which, in the capital, I’ve come to assess by noting the ratio of cockapoos to uniformed patrol officers – had swung noticeably against the dogs and in favour of the police.
The food at St John’s Tavern really is remarkable: I had a generously sized cut of seared tuna which – and I write as somebody who has spent a lot of time on the Gulf of Mexico and the coastal Mediterranean – is as good as any I have had anywhere. If that description lacks detail, I have to confess, as a life-long misophonic, to a detestation of professional reviewers’ preferred adjectives such as tender, moist and flavoursome.
I have attempted sauce vierge, which accompanied the tuna, but never come close to anything as good as this. Its traditional base is olive oil, lemon juice, tomato and basil. Disturbing the longstanding and inspirational head chef, Karl Omell, to ask him to divulge exactly what else he’s done to it, I told Ian – who, like me, is a long-time aficionado of Phil Silvers – would have meant recalling a scene from Sergeant Bilko which I can remember mentioning the first time the two of us came here: from the episode where the sergeant is trying to get the secret recipe from a French chef whose ragout has customers queuing around the block.
“I have dined in the world’s finest establishments,” Silvers tells the chef. “When I say ‘dined’… I thought I was dining. I now realise that I was merely grazing, like an animal.”
I’m allergic to scallops, so have to take Ian’s word for their being: “succulent and a generous medium size, presented with a superb Catalan picada, and their orange coral, which many restaurants leave out.” Even though one of my few other longstanding friends is the Chianti-based macellaio and restaurateur Dario Cecchini (often described as “the most famous butcher in the world”), I inconveniently don’t eat meat, so have to turn again to Ian concerning his bavette (flank steak).
“It needs to be cooked rare on a screamingly hot skillet for a couple of minutes then left to rest,” he told me, “then sliced thinly across the grain. The chef has done this perfectly; the sauce is a rich béarnaise with green peppercorns. I know you don’t like these words,” he says, “but’s it’s utterly delicious.”
We each had the burnt Basque cheesecake with blood orange caramel which I could happily eat for every day of the rest of what might — were you to adopt that regime — admittedly be a slightly abbreviated life.
St John’s circular leather booths give you the feeling of sitting in the car of an old-style fairground waltzer: without, that is, the requirement of having to cling on for dear life as you feel the blood drain from your face, though friends inform me that, should you conclude your visit with an in-depth tasting session of the Chateau de Laubade Armagnac, that sensation, too, can be replicated.
I’m aware that, when it comes to eating out, I am swayed more than most by the character of the building and of the staff (who are friendly, attentive, and kindly don’t seek to correct two diners who choose to drink fine wine — Lirac [Roger Sabon, 2022] a wonderfully explosive southern Rhone — from tumblers rather than the standard ornate long-stemmed glasses).
Karl Omell has been producing food of this quality here for 24 years. By contrast with some others at the top of his profession, he is reluctant to broadcast his own achievements, though when I was researching this article one of his colleagues did let slip that he has recently been recruited to prepare a banquet for a senior member of the royal family. The longer he’s been here, the more bemused I’ve become by the way that St John’s Tavern has not become more widely celebrated as — to use that enervating phrase, but in this case the only one that will do — a national treasure.
It has partly to do with geography. Before the building was lovingly restored by owner Nic Sharpe, this main room at the Tavern, which dates back to the 1860s, had been a boisterous Irish pub with snooker tables. In the Eighties and Nineties it hosted concerts featuring such disparate artists as Screaming Lord Sutch and, as one local told me, a young Courtney Love, performing with members of the group that would go on to be Babes in Toyland. The local area, between Archway and Tufnell Park, while far from intimidating, remains untransformed by the wave of gentrification that has engulfed places like Shoreditch and Dalston.
The longer head chef Karl Omell has been here, the more bemused I’ve been that St John’s Tavern has not become more widely celebrated as — to use that enervating phrase, but in this case the only one that will do — a national treasure
As we’re preparing to leave I tell Irvine how, at one point back there, I found myself visited by that rare if fleeting sense that there is nowhere else that you would rather be, anywhere in the world. “It’s fairly unusual,” I tell him. It isn’t a feeling I have ever experienced in more ostentatious places like Paris Ritz, the London Ivy or the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. I think it’s triggered by the company, the surroundings, and the character of the waiting staff.
“Not to mention,” he says, “that second bottle of Lirac.”
Attempting to scrawl a few notes on the Northern Line home, I find myself revisited by more unwelcome memories of my often catastrophic and swiftly curtailed relationships with restaurateurs and food editors. It was probably a mistake, when completing (an unpublished) review of a restaurant in Aberdeenshire, to characterise “my companion” as an extra-terrestrial who found the mushroom biryani difficult to metabolise.
In this context I’m aware that last time I reviewed St John’s Tavern, thirteen years ago, I was guilty of what some regarded as a breach of etiquette by awarding them a straight ten out of ten. I know this because the then CEO of the publication (a man well-placed to know) informed me, by email, that “nothing in anybody’s life, especially yours, will ever be that perfect.”
To which I can only respond, in assessing this more recent visit, with the immortal words of Nigel Tufnell, when he shows off his amplifier in the final scene of This Is Spinal Tap, namely: “this one goes to eleven.”
