Don appetit | Rowley Leigh’s return to London dining

Just before my coffee at the end of dinner at the Don, chef Rowley Leigh throws himself down in a chair beside my table, requisitions my bottle of sparkling water to top up his finger of whiskey, and fixes me with an intense stare. “I’ve been told you’re very important, and I absolutely have to talk to you.”

what’s going on with those oeufs “en meurette”?

I’m not at all, but I am glad to ask him a question: what’s going on with those oeufs “en meurette”? I had them for a starter and, despite how much I’ve enjoyed the rest of dinner, I can’t think about anything else. “A totally illogical dish!” he hoots, as if I’m the one who’s presented to him a plate of eggs poached in Burgundy, slathered in a reduction thick with chanterelles and chunky lardons. The eggs are silky, the sauce so deeply, richly flavoured as to suggest we might need to coin a new word meaning “more umami than umami”. It’s a recipe older than classic (the name, describing the red wine reduction it’s sauced with, derives from Old French), yet, as Leigh explains, until recently it would have been too much of a faff for a restaurant to bother with: now, the kitchen’s minutely controllable temperatures allow the eggs to cook slowly and steadily while the other components are assembled in time to meet the now perfectly poached egg. Technique and technology in great harmony. “You couldn’t eat it in the morning, though,” Leigh notes, then, as I’m about to witter on about how early you’d have to get up to prepare it, he adds: “Far too rich.” I nod, as though the idea of eating it again at the earliest possible meal opportunity were very far from my mind.

Leigh is a veteran of the food scene, having worked in London restaurants over the past five decades. He’s also an innovator. As head chef at Kensington Place, he came up with the idea of treating scallop like lamb, with which it shares a certain texture profile, and serving the mollusc with puréed peas and a mint vinaigrette—an idea that’s been ripped off elsewhere ever since—but, undeterred, he’s continued to devise new so-simple-they’re-brilliant combinations, such as another starter at the Don which perfectly pairs two buttery, fatty indulgences, raw Bluefin tuna and dripping toast. Main courses are more trad, and include a chicken Milanese, lamb chops, a turbot to be shared between two, and red mullet with saffron mash and citrus fruits—you so seldom see red mullet on a menu and I leapt for it, though it was a summery dish on a wintry night.

This is robust, punchy cooking with big flavours, which is what’s called for in a restaurant that comes with a potentially overwhelming backstory. Tucked away on one of those immaculate side streets unique to the City of London, so television-set sparkling it’s as if the flagstones have been treated with Windex, the Don is based in the former premises of George Sandeman, who began trading in port and sherry in the early 1800s. When you go downstairs to the bathrooms in the onetime cellars, their vaulted ceilings still intact, you enter one of London’s subterranean nexuses where histories interact: there’s a doorway (a portal, you might say) to one of the original London livery companies, and you’re near the even more ancient Mithraeum—yet the vibration of trains from nearby Cannon Street and Monument stations is also discernible.

In a classic space, classic flavours: terrine and steak and rum baba, and maybe not too many surprises. Yet this is an altogether warmer kind of familiar than the austerity-chic menus to be found at London’s more prominently feted new openings—places where a mutton chop and some turnips, or a slice of terrine with a miserly couple of cornichons, will set you back a bizarre amount and where you’re slightly startled to see a fancy wine list rather than being served grey tea in an enamel mug. No such startlement at the Don, where a sommelier of incredible charm talks us through glorious glasses, including a burstingly summery Lalama from Spain and, with the cheese course, naturally, one of Sandeman’s own tawny ports.

Despite my love of port, I end up taking a glass of tokaji as I also can’t resist a simple, expert sliver of chocolate tart for dessert. There’s another glorious sauce here, a warm caramel (salted, as is the fashion, and has been for maybe long enough now: when it’s being applied to the McFlurry, the trend has really run its course). Once I’d finished the tart, I’m not at all ashamed to admit here—much though I tried to disguise what I was doing at the time—I poured the sauce into my dessert spoon and ate by itself, mouthful by sumptuous sticky mouthful, glad I possessed just enough self-respect not to drink it directly from its jug.

I do have some restraint, however: in the end, I followed Rowley Leigh’s injunction and did not try to make oeufs en meurette the next day for breakfast. Nor will I attempt them at home at all, I think – I’d rather come back to the Don and eat them made by the master. C

The Don, 19–23 St Swithins Lane, London EC4N 8AD
thedonlondon.com; +44 207 621 1148