Why do I Keep Doing This to Myself?
Slapdash marxism, London's oldest restaurant and a recipe for trout gravlax
London offered its sky – murky grey, the colour of granite, without depth, not firm but soft, a sky that would be shapeless if it was not infinite. I had new brogues that pinched my feet and slipped on Covent Garden’s drizzle-damp cobbles. I was hungry, a touch depressed and glad to be journeying lunchward. A clown danced madly with a child, a boy of eight or so, surrounded by two hundred spectators, clapping, shouting, whistling. When Inigo Jones designed Covent Garden Square, London’s first and finest piazza, he was guided by Livorno and Florence’s squares as inspiration - sites of carnivals, book burnings and beheadings. He would recognise the crowd.
He would not recognise Rules, which opened round the corner in 1798, a century and a half after his death. More generally, he wouldn’t have recognised its purpose, since restaurants as we understand them did not emerge until the mid-eighteenth century, first in Paris and after London. Their innovation was marked by private tables rather than shared tables or private rooms; and an attention to detail: tablecloths, silverware, crystal glass. Most importantly, meals were served in the way we would recognise now, in courses and on individual plates, a labour-intensive form of service imported from Imperial Russia – à la Russe.
I think of the beginning of restaurants as a pooling of resources by the emerging bourgeoisie and conjecture that it went something like this – diners who could not afford the staff necessary for dining à là Russe at home could if they paid for only part of a servant’s time. This began in the private rooms of cabarets in Paris and taverns in London, but restaurateurs found that more money could be made by pressing diners close together, and so acquired large houses, spreading tables throughout their rooms. Rules is such a house, a fact obvious to its staff who must run up and down staircases all day.
An irony of this – no, actually, not an irony, the point – is that the servants who became waiters found more of their time was taken up with serving than in a grand house, where a lot of time was spent standing around, waiting to be called, unused. One could even see the early restaurant, with its delineated roles in and out of the kitchen, as pre-dating the assembly line logic of Fordism. That this pooling of resources allowed an imitation of aristocratic fashion is obvious from the dress of early waiters – who looked like footmen – and the furnishing of the rooms, as vulgarly decorated as any aristocratic house.
~
Inside Rules, the air is heavy and dusty, still with the scents of England. I’m early. I’m always early for lunch somewhere new. I like to sniff about, to get the measure of a place, feel out its corners, touch its fabric. “I’m early,” I say to the greeter behind her lectern “Is my table ready?” “Yes, though perhaps you’d like to wait in the bar?”
Up carpeted stairs I find overstuffed pouffe chairs and shiny brass stools, a gigantic dispenser of candied nuts and an unsmiling Spanish waiter. “Would sir like a drink? And how many are we today?” I hate it when waiters are made to say sir. “Just a drink before lunch, I’m being joined later.” “Ah, I see here, by two others. Let me get you a table ready.” “Don’t worry, I’ll go downstairs when they arrive.” He insists. I tell him I want to sit at the bar. He says there won’t be space. I tell him I’ll go down. He says that I should trust his fifteen years in hospitality. He will get a table ready. Unable to back down, I say, no and remain at the bar.
He sets a table and I stay on my stool and am hot under the collar and shy and embarrassed, caught in the knowledge that my small rebellions no longer belong to a schoolboy straining against authority, but to a grown man too stubborn to do as a waiter tells him. He leaves and does not return. Time passes, a clock ticks. A lot of time has passed here. On the walls are caricatures, photographs of soldiers, photographs of statesmen, photographs of royals, of handsome women with tennis rackets, dogs, foxes, and cricket. My table sits, lonely, and I get up to fetch the nuts he’s set out for me. They are excellent.
“Hello sir!” The new barman is blond. I don’t trust blond men, it’s a hair colour for children “And what can I get you today?” He’s playing the part, grinning, mouth from ear to ear. He’s deep in it, full of the kool-aid. English, no accent – somewhere from the South East, Suffolk maybe, a small town of semis with a playing field and a pub, slow summer evenings, The Daily Mail, brown ale, stuporous Tory voting. I tell him a pink tonic and smile and turn to my book. He talks, and talks, has me trapped, and I wonder if the Spanish waiter had been trying to do me a favour.
~
Downstairs is as it should be, a spirited recollection of England. Tables of men in old suits – not flash, worn, but well-tailored – sit and stare lovingly at one another’s florid faces. Also American tourists, yappy, happy, and City types in gillets and light blue and pink Oxford shirts. A lovely waiter pulls the table far out from the wall – a table’s width out – so that I can comfortably sit behind it. White tablecloth, good. The cutlery is light, stainless steel and plated, faux. Bad, the staff still have to polish it without the weight of silver. Down here the walls bear fewer photographs and bear many bad English oils of innumerable unrecognisable citizens of Who’s Who, kept company by the stuffed heads of deer and a few prized trout.
“You know… Gibbons. He was a good master. Gave a sound beating, really sound. I never minded, really, I think the craft of it, the craft he put into the beating… astonishing.” He is large and grinning and about eighty, in a regimental tie, with two others of the same look and age – one laughing along, the other with a look of near sublime sadness. “But Tims, he was a bastard, and there was no rhyme or reason to who he’d pick, I remember – do you remember Parry? Small boy – well, he went at him so badly, couldn’t bloody walk.” Reminiscing, eating steak and kidney pudding, drinking claret, happy in the glow of England past he does not register that “Parry” causes a shock of fright upon his sad friend’s face.
The others arrive. C– says “this is like a restaurant in Paris!” and for a second I think, no, it is deeply English! But she is right, for this is what it was meant to resemble when Thomas Rule opened his doors all those years ago – a modern Parisian restaurant. My view across the street is of the neon signage of the Big Easy, a one-time power station turned open kitchen for hickory smoked meats, a taste of Texas.
The menu is a mix of gastro-pub-esque game and fish with jus and reductions, insincere salads and soups and traditional Bri-ish food. Steak and kidney pie and pudding, lamb chops and roast beef. I order the pudding, S– the pie, and C– duck, more interested in a nice lunch than indulging the past.
The food arrives with a fanfare of silverware - a gravy boat, a bowl for chips, another for horseradish, and is placed with military precision. The pie looks like a pie, while the pudding is soft-edged, topped by an oyster that’s been grilled with something greenish: parsley? Eating it gives no clues. Did you know an oyster can be bland? I did not. Cutting into the pudding is rather like cutting into a bag which spills out stewing steak and calf kidneys.
“Why’s it called a pudding? What is it?” I explain it’s steamed and that, for a while, the pudding rivalled the pie in popularity. I guess it’s because the pie required an oven, which most people didn’t have, while a pudding could be steamed atop a stove or fire. The pudding is bland, undersalted, and tasting the pie I find the pastry to have the same faults and more besides – is it made with margarine rather than butter? The mouthfeel is wrong. The beef in both is drab and the gravy lacks punch, is insipid. Only the chips in their silver are good.
I look over at the other tables, all of whom are tucking in with gusto. I think of Bertie Wooster praising Anatole’s puddings. I wonder – is this expression of an almost dead British cuisine – not tarted up with flavour as at St John – proof that the food was, actually, as bad as everyone says? For dessert I have Baked Alaska, which tastes as if it was from a packet, and notice a friend – the daughter of a politician, the only child of a politician I know – coming toward the table and shout hello. C– says that it’s like we’re in a society novel.
Coffee, too, is bad – weak – and as I drink it a group of Americans sit beside us, a real down-home middle-American bunch, in t-shirts, here to find England. I tell them they ought to order a Black Velvet and, in my most English accent – knowing I’m an extra and ought to keep in character – that it was made for Prince Albert’s funeral. “Did you know him?” One asks, then grins, and we all laugh. I look around, the room heaving to maintain the absurdity of history, Atlas-like against the weight of England’s flailings and failings, doing the work of a living museum, a historical town, of vicious propaganda and ludicrous farce and think, I hate this country.
After reading, T– asked why I keep doing this, since I so plainly hate these places? I was at a party talking to an Irish novelist, a Catholic from the North, about London’s best restaurants for a birthday, and I recommended Rules, with the caveat that it would make her skin crawl, would rightly raise her republican hackles. “But that’s the fun” she said “to go, to feel a bit sick, to enjoy the theatre.” And that’s why I keep going – theatre. At a restaurant like Rules theatre is taken seriously in a way it rarely is: there are no actors, no audience, only members of the cast, each perfectly speaking their lines. An escape room could never.
Trout Gravlax
Strictly speaking this isn’t gravlax at all, since ‘grav’ means cured and ‘lax’ salmon, but to simply call it cured trout would omit the recipe’s borrowing of the Nordic method. Beet makes the flesh red on the inside, while it holds its bright pink insides, making it look sort-of flowery, sort-of strawberry-esque. Google the method and you’ll be told it’s simple and impressive, which is true.
Have a fishmonger fillet and pin-boned a trout for you. Mix 1pt white sugar with 1pt salt in a large bowl and add a large bunch of finely chopped dill, a tsp of ground white pepper, a tsp of ground fennel seeds, a tsp of ground coriander, a pinch of mace and another of aniseed. Grate three beetroots. Unfurl cling film onto a board and lay half the grated beet onto it in the shape of your trout fillet, followed by a fistful of the sugar/salt and lay the fillet atop. Press sugar/salt onto the other half and follow with grated beet. Wrap tightly in cling film and repeat with the other fillet(s). I tent to pop the cling-filmed fish into a sealable freezer bag, since the beet juice always leaks. Place the bag in a dish and leave in your fridge for 24-36 hours. When ready to serve, remove from the wrapping, rinse under cold water and slice thinly. Especially good with fresh butter made with lemon rind.