Northbank Restaurant, London
Every reviewer has a different approach to how she handles her subject: booking under a false name; making pretentious notes after every bite; photographing their food to remember it; or – my preferred choice – enjoying the meal with a friend as a normal diner would do, and then writing up as much as my wine-fed brain can recollect after foraging beneath the bed for the crumpled menu to check whether the smear under the pork belly was apple or celeriac.
I have only one rule, and that is never to take a first date. Neither the date nor the food receives ample attention and I can’t be sure a date won’t recoil with disgust if I swig from his glass or eat off his plate – both of which I will happily do on the second date. But when I went to Northbank, on a rare and sunny autumn evening, I broke that rule for two reasons: firstly, because it’s a great date place, and secondly, because my date, J., works in telly and only had one free evening where he didn’t have to learn lines and go to bed at 8pm.
“Look at the design, it’s amazing,” he says, before checking his phone and then glancing at himself in the mirror
When the sun’s out, it’s almost impossible to find an outdoor spot in the City that isn’t already rammed to the roped-off edges with a sausage-fest of suits. But Northbank is secluded. When it comes to dining on the Thames, every tourist knows Le Pont de la Tour, but not Northbank. You hunt for it, walk past it, walk back again and then realise that the nicely noisy outdoor terrace, which looks like a private party, must have a restaurant inside. To the left is a bar and to the right, a warmly lit but rather bland room reminiscent of the dreadful Bank restaurants, which, if you lived in Birmingham in the late nineties, were the pinnacle of yuppie high-end dining. But once we’re seated in an elevated booth, with distressed mirrors along one wall and a table of angry women against the other, the fine details begin to reveal themselves. Big, bald bulbs are bunched overhead, and while I read the menu, J. points to the back of it. “Look at the design, it’s amazing,” he says, before checking his phone and then glancing at himself in the mirror.
And it is. Designed by Timorous Beasties, the menu and the wallpaper, which appear initially to be traditional Toile du Jouy, are on closer inspection an incisive portrayal of the Bankside area surrounding the restaurant, featuring motifs of a homeless person watching a white banker march by on his phone, a Sikh gentleman on a bench, and a black person wielding a gun. Suddenly the place has piqued my interest: vanilla on the surface but a smack of chilli underneath.
London Toile by Timorous Beasties
Bang opposite Tate Modern, with a twinkly, please-kiss-me-on-the-bridge view of the city, Northbank markets itself as a sort of Cornwall-on-Thames restaurant. Jason Marchant’s menu is the culinary equivalent of a cashmere comfort blanket: Falmouth crab tortellini; smoked haddock with Cornish yarg rarebit; seared scallops; ribeye with bone marrow or truffle sauce – and their signature, and delicious, Hog’s Pudding shoehorned into as many dishes as possible.
My seared scallops were plump, tanned, and soaked through with the flavour of crisp bacon and butternut squash. J.’s whole dressed crab with celeriac remoulade and toast came on a wooden chopping board (doesn’t everything these days?) with tiny pots of fun to play with, encouraging lots of mess. Roasted chicken with chorizo was a tad on the dry side – but, gooed up by an accompanying risotto, creamed, blended like baby food, and accompanied by a superb Etienne Boileau Chablis (with a delicious minerality on the finish), it slipped down a treat. A side order of grilled field mushrooms and chorizo was overdoing it; no mains here need sides.
While jabbering, I noticed, much to my disappointment, that J. was wiping up the last of his Cornish venison loin, roasted plums and fondant potato. “Just say it was rare, cooked with a rich, red wine jus, and really good,” he said, glancing at his reflection again. No longer was the mirror the only thing at the table that was distressed.
Now, of late, something bad has been happening to desserts in restaurants. Reading out the choices, I find the beginning of the sentence full of promise, then tapering off into a hell-realm of ingredients: dark chocolate fondant (yes!) with pepper and aniseed cream (no!); or traditional apple crumble (go on…) with burnt caramel and liquorice toad (no, please don’t). Thankfully, there was no messing around at Northbank: steamed roly-poly with raspberry jam came with two small jugs of custard and cream; a dark, potent coffee and chocolate mousse came in an espresso cup with vanilla cream and a sablé biscuit. Delicious. And normal.
As I’m halfway through spooning out the last of my mousse, I hear J. saying how much he can’t wait to go to Thailand to shag loads of girls over Christmas, and I realise that I have formulated two new rules. Don’t tell anyone where Northbank is so it doesn’t become overrun – and don’t date berks off the telly. C
Northbank Restaurant, Millennium Bridge, One Paul’s Walk, London EC4V
020-7329 9299; northbankrestaurant.com
Monisha Rajesh is the author of Around India in 80 Trains and a journalist at The Week. Follow her on Twitter @Monisha_Rajesh