No buzz: the main dining room
(Picture: Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures Ltd)“So,” said my mate, turning to me midway through lunch at The Black Sheep in Wimbledon. “What, er, made you choose this place?” That I had already been privately asking myself versions of that question probably gives you a sense of how this meal eventually played out. Still, let us look at the various candidates.
Had it been the lure of visiting SW19 while the tennis was on? Was it a vague sense of guilt about not schlepping to this part of town nearly enough? Or was it merely curiosity about the Gladwin brothers, the sibling farmer-restaurateur founders of this place, plus five others, that form a rapidly expanding “farm-to-fork” empire across west and central London? The truth was probably some mixture of all three.
Venturing outside my comfort zone has previously served me pretty well. However, on this occasion, as another playful spin on some quintessentially British flavour combination arrived devoid of the requisite skilled execution, it was hard to keep a grip on any of these justifications.
Though it never tipped into full-scale disaster, The Black Sheep did seem afflicted by a kind of well-meaning mediocrity; the cumulative mass of double faults that can, in its own strange way, haunt and frustrate you more than a total calamity. Lots of it was sort-of fine. That almost made it worse.
This general impression wasn’t helped by an especially harsh transition from street to restaurant. Outside, Wimbledon Village was in full Pimms-burping mode, all flapping purple-and-green flags, shop windows hung with floral tennis displays, and beer garden drinkers in the pummelling sunshine. And so to step from that into the Black Sheep’s long, airless and scantly peopled space was to feel a little cordoned off from any prospect of fun and conviviality. It is a room that would be improved massively by big windows that could open out onto the High Street’s passing colour and bustle. The only appreciable buzz came from a couple of flies at our table. An introductory one-bite snack of savoury eclair — filled with a spurt of overpoweringly primed “mushroom marmite” — was instructive in the sense that it was a fun idea, clumsily rendered. Decent, gnarled nuggets of buttermilk fried chicken wore a needless splodge of mashed peas and lovage. Broad bean puree, meanwhile, was guacamole as a cruel prank.
“I’m finding this all a bit underpowered,” said the other pal at the table, as we jointly consoled ourselves with appealing glasses of Nutbourne blush rosé from an impressively reasonable list that majors on bottles from the Gladwin’s own West Sussex vineyard. She wasn’t wrong. And what was especially mystifying was that, as with a beef carpaccio tricked out with pickled whole shallots, mini doughnuts and a kind of bone marrow mayo, multiple bells and whistles tended to be deployed in service of stubbornly muted flavours .
Thankfully, there was partial salvation late on. The roast potatoes were unaccountably brilliant
Thankfully, there was partial salvation late on. Whole baked megrim sole had a gorgeously soft, steamed succulence; palpably smoky charred broccoli dusted with sumac was inspired. The roast potatoes, cooked to a deep bronze and part-crushed to form sharply crisp, mountainous crags, were unaccountably brilliant.
But are very good spuds enough? Does a solid, meringue-sprinkled strawberries and cream jelly fully counteract the overboiled eggs in a gargantuan “trending salad”? Or the pork chop cooked to rubbery, parched toughness? These things seem, to me, to be minimum requirements when set against the capital’s many other blazingly gifted and consistent kitchens.
Perhaps that is part of it. The Gladwins clearly have a successful formula on their hands; their sustainable ethos is laudable. And yet the abiding feeling I had was that, though we were only in Zone 3, I had never felt so far away from the concentrated energy, creativity and craft that makes London dining so reliably exciting. The team here may be shepherding a rural-leaning neighbourhood revolution. But The Black Sheep did not make me want to join the flock.
