Our Own Disneylands
A sort-of review of the St John pop-up at Fortnums
I work around the corner from Fortnums and I’ll often walk through it on my lunchtime stroll: around St James Square, up onto Piccadilly to buy a Red Bull, through Fortnums and back to the library. I like the conversations I overhear as I pass through – tourists from the UK talk with rushed obsequience to the staff, as if embarrassed to be trespassing on such hallowed ground, and women admonish husbands for being bored – ‘if you want, you and your dad can go to the pub and me and your mum will finish in here, we’ll need an hour or so!’ Tourists from abroad are not shy, demand rather than request, lugging tins of tea and biscuits in metal wire shopping baskets. The difference is our obsession with class: a Brit feels the sickening weight of Fortnum & Mason’s age and pedigree, and the very real, very heavy structure this stands for. A foreigner sees the bizarrely dressed assistants – they wear sort of riding jackets – and the pomp as part of the quaint English Disneyland that has made up their holiday in London.
For a shop, Fortnum & Mason is regal. It is London’s oldest department store, founded in 1707, and sits in a neighbourhood that was posh before it opened and has never not been posh since. It faces the Royal Academy of Arts, in the midst of clubland – members clubs, not dancing clubs, though there is a strip club called Gaslight around the corner – and a stone’s throw from St James' Palace, where the monarch receives ambassadors. It is where the Scotch egg was invented. Its hampers are a byword for luxury. There are lavatory attendants in its toilets. It supplies the Royal Household and the Prince of Wales. It stands for order, tradition and hierarchy. Grandparents like it. The sort of people who place flowers outside Buckingham Palace when the King is ill like it. If it did not have its own brand identity it would be festooned with Keep Calm and Carry On posters. In Fortnum & Mason, the sun has not yet set on the British Empire. This stifling and lazy reliance on tradition would be cute – historical reenactment, even, kitsch and devoid of political resonance – if the majority of our cabinet had not gone to schools that trade on this very style, or if all but two or three of our twentieth and twenty-first century prime ministers had not come down to parliament from our own Disneyland Castles, the spires of Oxbridge.
And so, when I heard that the older brother of my one of my favourite restaurants – I prefer Bread and Wine to Smithfields, it is jollier – was hosting a “pop-up” there for three weeks in February, I scoffed.
How would St John live up to the dull comfort of a department store restaurant while retaining its essence? Would it be poisoned by the mediocrity of Fortnums?
~
On the tube to lunch, I asked my companions what they thought of St John. One, who is Polish, said its seemingly uncomplicated relationship to a fantasy of national style represented a sort of self-assured patriotism she could not imagine anywhere in Eastern Europe. To go to such a place in Warsaw would make her feel like she was leaning into a grotesque nationalism, one of country houses, Tatler, tweed. This was fascinating because, to me, St John stands for something completely different: a reaction against the lazy and vulgar reliance on tradition that stalks so much of British culture.
St John opened in 1994, the year of my birth, in a former bacon smokehouse. It served, and still does, offal and cuts of meat much neglected by other British restaurants – ears, hearts, snouts – and revived or invented traditional English recipes. It did not practise a snobbish excess in cookery, nor ape the French or the Italians, but cooked food that tapped into the oddities, triumphs and deficits of Britain’s produce and what exists of its culinary tradition. The food was paired back, simple, wholesome, rejecting pretension and frilliness. There were others before it in England doing similar things, but none so successful. The model for this English restaurant was a refinement of the sort of simple eatery you can find in any decent European town, serving local food with quiet confidence.
If an expensive restaurant with white tablecloths can be radical, St John’s was. But it’s hard to see this now, because the style of cooking St John popularised has become our national restaurant cuisine: you can get a delicious cut of an ex-dairy cow in a minimally decorated room in any affluent town or city in the UK. In London, the novelty of a new British restaurant can be measured by how far it strays from St John – Café Cecilia serves pasta! The Plimsoll serves a pigeon buna! And so, to my Polish friend with four or so years of British food under her belt, St John seems like just one of many places serving our national cuisine, as lazily British as high-tea at Fortnum & Mason’s.
But it isn’t! It really isn’t! It’s about British food growing up, becoming European without being European. Being itself, taking itself and the diner seriously. My other lunch partner said that the setting – amongst the flounce of Fortnums — reiterated to her just how grounded St John is, how delicately rational. The waiters do not cow-tow but act as if they are inducting one into a ritual that they know better than you, echoing professional waiters on the continent, those priests of dining. It represents a culture maturing – if only in this way – to the stage that it can take dining seriously without exoticism or pantomime.
I’ve now eaten at the various St John’s frequently enough to feel an easy familiarity with the highs and lows of the ever changing menu. Sometimes, there isn’t really anything I want. Occasionally the food is too rich, or whichever chef is in charge is having an off day. I have eaten mediocre meals there, but these are forgivable. Generally there will be a dish that interrogates and explores mundane food, food that I know I can cook myself, and conjures something novel and exciting. But the true constancy is not even the food, it is the lazy feeling of comfort that comes from being well looked after, of leaving a place where everything seems to be okay, a temporary utopia.
~
The day was bleak: a dark grey sky, a whipping wind and something a little more intense than drizzle swept Piccadilly. Such weather is bracing on moor or fenland, the extremity illuminating the grandeur of the natural world, but on tourist-ridden streets it is cramped and dispiriting, forcing people to move in droves, onward toward some underwhelming destination, wet and upset.
The warm bright lights of Fortnums were welcome, and we strode inside excitedly, shaking the weather from our persons, all very hungry. If Fortnums has charm, it is in its material totality. It is almost as good as Disneyland: the shop attendants are as dressed up as the shop itself, which lavishes attention on its decoration, lighting trained to highlight its nineteenth-century shelves and counters. And as with Disneyland, whose shops and restaurants are often flights of quite remarkable fancy, the products Fortnum’s sells are oddly mismatched, ugly, unconvincing. But this is fine: this is not a food shop, but a gift shop for the ren fair that is London.
And, so, a surprising place for St John to make its temporary home. The restaurant has taken the place of Fortnum’s first floor café, which is on a raised platform behind the shop floor. I am struck to notice that it is quite empty and aseptically lit, contrasting savagely with the jolly glow of the shop floor, creating a cordon sanitaire between the two spaces. Only when we’re up the stairs and out of Fortnum’s does it make sense, emulating the cool sharp light of the restaurants.
The emptiness is explained by the odd position St John occupies here – half a restaurant taking bookings, half a bar for walk-ins, making it feel a bit like we’re sat beside another restaurant, which is closed, in an airport. Later, an oligarch and his family, with an unruly mass of Selfridges bags in tow, wife in gaudily marked glasses, plump children comfortable in designer sportswear, takes one of the tables; when their food comes, they pick at it disconsolately, looking a little confused. I wonder how the tourists and the global rich have fared with St John’s casual plating – has there been confusion, complaints from those who do not have a grasp of the place’s intellectual underpinning? I imagine grandmothers upset by such casualness when they sit down for lunch during their yearly trip to London.
We are seated with spritely efficiency and presented with menus. One of my companions comments on the beautiful windows, semi circles of three panes, painted white for the occasion, elegant and nautical. She says that she wishes there was a little more of a border between the shop floor and the café – some sheer hanging fabric, perhaps. I agree, though I’m surprised: usually I find it exhilarating to eat somewhere overlooking a busy scene. Again, it is the fault of the lights, the animal difference of their clashing.
In the uneasy collision of Fortnum’s and St John’s any fakery in Fortnums – poorly painted gold mirrors, for instance, is laid bare by St John’s rigorous simplicity. This lends a sort of fairground oddity to the pop-up, exaggerating the shop’s grandeur and making the restaurant seem almost dowdy, Dutch Protestantism against the Spanish Baroque. I veer back and forth from deciding who comes off on top – the style I like, or the more exuberant one I do not?
Before ordering, one of my companions asked that a spotted dick be reserved for our pudding. She has been stung too many times before, she explains, by her desired pudding item running out before she’s ordered. We smile indulgently but, when the waiter returns, he tells her she’d made the right call, since there were only two left, and she basks in her good sense. When we were in our first flat, at the end of our teenage years, she’d often develop a strange craving for spotted dick late at night, sending me into the streets to find it, which I never did, and saw me returning only with a yellow tub of Bird’s Custard.
I attempted to strike a balance between rich and light – two salads, marrow, mince on toast, duck legs, hake. The marrow comes and is a touch disappointing, mean in a way St John is not, the bones under-full. Worse, there are only three or four tiny capers with the parsley, which is not a small matter. Perhaps they’d run-out, and they’d had to wrestle the last capers from the bottom of the last Opie jar. Behind us the hubbub of Fortnum’s continues and across the room an American with long hair in a baseball cap waxes lyrical about startup culture, his inflections wonky, his r’s too long.
Both salads come at once, which is odd, along with the duck. The duck is excellent, still firm, a moist allusion to fried chicken, while the green salad and the oak leaf with snails are overdressed, providing no counterbalance. Before these plates are cleared come the mince on dripping toast and the hake, crowding the table joyously. The hake is a poem to the heights reached by butter and fish, while the mince is primally enjoyable, nourishing, the sort of thing a brilliant but rushed parent would serve a hungry child. The meal is good, but too much, simply because the salads are overdressed – no relief after a bite of dripping toast. Indulgence turns to gluttony, and we can’t quite finish. We hold out for the spotted dick, which, when it comes, is heavy, with too few raisins, making us yearn for school dinners rather than elevating their memory. As we leave, I realise the almost animal calm I associate with a meal at St John is missing. The shouts of the shop push it away, drowning the calm of its execution in the chaos of commerce.
Funnily enough, the best executed pop-up I have ever been to was Fortnum & Mason’s at Port Eliot Festival. It was in an orangery, run exceptionally efficiently, with excellent English treats. The decorations were minimal – the nineteenth-century orangery was the real beauty – and the food simple and well executed. There was no Fortnum’s tat, only what was charming remained. But when I remember it, I do not wish for the shop. I wish for the pop-up alone, the Cornish sun, the revellers. This pop-up made me feel quite the opposite, reminding me that St John is welcoming and homely, its approach to British food clever and inquisitive. I’m glad it’s going home.
This essay first appeared in Issue 2 of The Toe Rag, a print magazine focused on non-profit/independent arts and culture in London which is available at over 50 venues across the city.
@thetoerag www.thetoerag.com