Le Garrick
This is the beginning of the end. You’ll see. The restaurants we dine in during critical moments of our lives often, I think, shape our taste long after those moments have softened into something else. They draw us back with the promise of refuge; sanctuaries of a sort. Asylums too, depending on the crisis.
Le Garrick is one of mine. Forty this year — it, not me — Le Garrick is a bistro I remember fondly but dimly from teenage visits up to town, popping pre- or post-theatre for a remarkably good set menu of things like French onion soup and tarte au citron, perhaps pâté de campagne and moules frites. It’s still going with the same menu: £22 for two courses, £26 for three. I had it not long ago before a bleakly cackhanded staging of The Importance of Being Earnest. Its only virtue was that it had an interval in which we could escape.
But Le Garrick is a restaurant I remember most from my early twenties, from my first days in London, when friends and I would come in, drink champagne and then the house wine — classy, eh? — and everyone would order beef bourguignon, including the part-time vegetarian. The only restaurants we knew about were places we couldn’t afford, and so instead we came here before tottering off to the Cork & Bottle in Leicester Square, a wine bar we loved but preferred to go into only with heavy colds, on account of the smell. A kind of graduation came after stumbling out of the Coach & Horses and into Cafe Boheme. We went so often one waiter snuck us a card granting half price on everything, and so we ordered two Rob Roys per person per round instead of just the one. Same bill, just twice as pissed. That education wasn’t for nothing, we’d say, before falling over. Silly buggers.
We’ve changed — some friends are quite proper people these days — but Le Garrick hasn’t. This is not a criticism. In the first instance, it means it looks the same, while we are craggier and greying, and in the second, it was hardly revolutionary in 1986. What it offered then was food that broke no moulds, using long-established recipes. It is a routine that plays as well now as it did in my early encounters, and as well as when onions were first sweated to caramel in the 1700s.
It is a routine I love in the same way it feels watching Morecambe and Wise reruns at Christmas. I like that in places it is a bit silly: the plastic red-and-white tablecloths that belong more properly in old trattorias and greasy spoons. The preposterously ornate picture frames. The fact that it has taste enough for proper French butter (Alain Ledanec) but still has fairy lights framing the mirror, as teenagers do. It is not faultless.
Neither is the food. What arrives at the table is exactly what’s wanted, but it would be wrong to suggest this is execution on the level of Paulette in Maida Vale or Henry Harris’s Bouchon Racine (his new cookbook might do wonders here).
Le Garrick serves the sort of things roadside places used to do in France
But we ate well: the mandatory onion soup was appropriately beefy, if a little short-trousered in the cheese department. For old times’ sake beef bourguignon was ordered; it arrived with a hefty dollop of mash and parsley confetti. It was perfect, the sort of thing roadside places used to do in France, though they have long since shut. Cassoulet, with its murky beans and pornographic sausage, did the job, though its duck was so dry I wondered if it had been to rehab before making the plate.
Le Garrick is the sort of place I will be going to until it shuts or I drop. It is imperfect and in that way, we match; we suit each other. It is the place I used to go and wonder if I’d ever do something fun, like write about restaurants. Back then I had a political column in the Telegraph. When the Standard came along, it gave me a chance to unwind, to relax, to write. I mention it as this is my last column here, at least for a while. The Standard gave me my chance and now exciting things lie in wait thanks to it. At the top I said this was the beginning of the end, but I was wrong. It’s the end of my beginning. Pretentious until the end. Thanks for reading.
What you say
Hugues Garel: “You just feel like home and don’t want to leave the place. The food is really French — try the cheesecake, it’s something.”
Kristjana: “Don’t usually rate Covent Garden restaurants but this delivered. The duck confit was beautiful, fell off the bone with a crisp skin. We had non-alcoholic wine, too, which was delicious.”
Maxime Lancella: “We were greeted by Samy who took the time to welcome us, serve us and answer all our questions. Professional and friendly, my friends and I highly recommend this restaurant!”
