Rotunda, Kings Cross
The idea that if you don’t have anything nice to say you shouldn’t say anything at all is, frankly, ridiculous. We spend enough of the day being so fraudulently nice to one another – “Your baby is so cute!”, “Sure, I would love to go camping!”, “I loved your new book!”, etc. – that sometimes we should just man up and be honest. So: Rotunda is a fabulous restaurant with excellent food. But the building it’s in is so god-awful that it is a mystery to me how they lure in any customers at all. It’s in Kings Place, which media-wankers will know as the new(ish) glass-building home of the Guardian. This is not somewhere you’d pass and think: “Oh, that looks fun, let’s pop in.” While it’s in the same neck of the woods as Caravan and Bruno Loubet’s Grain Store, which feature heavily on the foodie map of London, when it comes to Rotunda, you have to know it’s there.
What it looks like is the sort of place you’d frequent for after-work drinks – or, given the parlous state of the Grauniad, leaving-drinks – and never on any other occasion. It looks like a Wetherspoon’s, albeit without the sticky-ringed tables, stench of Sarson’s and laminated menus. Rotunda’s menu, in fact, is a huge fold-out job, one side of which lists the food and the other a cheesy “I love Rotunda” members’ offer, alongside an ad for a comedy and curry evening compered by Hardeep Singh Kohli, to comprise “Stand-up, a two-course curry and a dink” (sic).
What it looks like is the sort of place you’d frequent for after-work drinks – or, given the parlous state of the Grauniad, leaving-drinks – and never on any other occasion
In fairness, the building itself aside, the restaurant is in a lovely setting just by Regent’s Canal, with tables dotted around in the sunshine and swans sailing past within arm’s reach. Anyway, enough about the aesthetics. Onto the food.
I like it when the pre-appetisers veer away from variations on swanky bread, so a culinary salvo of Welsh rarebit fritters with a dribble of Lea & Perrins went down a treat, dunked in soft-boiled quail’s egg with celery salt and mayonnaise.
Cured Rye Bay scallops with tomato confit, toasted almonds, and spiced lemon and lime arrived all dressed for summer: the scallops were chilled, sliced into ten-pence rounds, and swimming around in what can only be described as melted lemon Calippo. I like my scallops hot and hunky, seared on a griddle plan, with their testicular quality left intact. Sugary lemon aside, these needed a sharp smack of chilli or salty garlic.
My companion had ordered the cod tongue and cheek with bacon jowl and squid ink aioli. “I didn’t really think about cod having tongues,” he said, but there it was: all deep-fried golden like a little breadcrumbed arrow. The bacon jowl, like cubed pork belly, gave a powerful kick to the lightly browned cod cheeks, all plump and meaty with black smears of rich fishy aioli. Delicious though the dish was, my companion found it a little on the dry side, and swiped some of the Calippo juice from my plate.
Rotunda is largely about meat. Vegetarians would be advised to, well, do one. All the beef and lamb served here is sourced from their farm in Maften, Northumberland, where the animals are born, bred, grass-fed and left to roam free over naturally fertilised farmland. Patience is a virtue: the cows are only slaughtered when the farmer feels they are ready, and the spring lambs are naturally reared so the bob-tailed cuties only arrive on the menu in June. Eggs are free range, and chickens and ducks are sourced from an independent farm in Goosnargh in Lancashire. Beef is hung for a minimum of 28 days on site, and should you wish, you can ask the waiter for a peek at it mid-hang.
Normally Rotunda’s style of farm-to-table worthiness would irritate beyond belief. But in light of recent food revelations, it’s good to know that my fillet steak does not comprise horse bollocks, brains, arse and tits. When I order the lamb, I like to know that his name was Simon and he died on Monday with his friends and family around him, and that his right hind leg tastes fabulous with triple-cooked chips and a glass of St Emilion Grand Cru.
The menu at Rotunda features two drawings, one of a cow and one of a sheep, divided up into a sort of butchery A–Z. Each letter corresponds to a different part of meat. It could serve as inspiration, or an education: rare is the occasion when I have thought, “You know, I really fancy a bit of shin.” Shins, surely, are for kicking. For the same reason, I’m not inclined to order “middle neck” of lamb, nor for that matter “scrag”, which sounds like the goo scraped out of a Sunday roasting tin and binned – or, if you’re Northern, spread on bread and eaten. (For the curious, the scrag appears to be the bit where a sheep would fold over its polo neck should it ever be wearing one.)
We went for the fillet steak to share and it arrived gleaming pink and steaming, with a cone of triple-cooked chips and salad, and three dollhouse pans containing Béarnaise, peppercorn sauce and mint. Soft, juicy and piping hot, the meat slipped down with a swirl of St Emilion, but still left room for a wee pudding.
The carrageenan and buttermilk pudding arrived looking like a massive poached egg with ketchup, but was sweet, soft, blancmange-like and creamy, with a delicate confit of raspberries and blackberries. The baked chocolate cake was a dribbly moelleux au chocolat, although we were disappointed that they had run out of salted caramel ice cream and made do with peanut.
By the time we left, the staff had all but gone, the chairs were on the tables and the digestifs were taking their toll. And Rotunda had established itself as a happy, meaty, jolly spot for those of us in the know – and so much better than the sum of its design parts. C
Rotunda, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9AG
rotundabarandrestaurant.co.uk; 020-7014 2840