Not a brag I suspect is heard in every town — you don’t imagine them belting it out on the beaches in Cleethorpes — but I think London can claim its place as the world’s greatest restaurant city. Not a new thought; I tend to smugly utter it after every mustard-smothered bite of a Brick Lane bagel, or while dipping into the cloudless sauce ravigote which pools around Bouchon Racine’s tête de veau. But it seems that just for the moment, London has the dining out malarkey just so. It is a city in need of a pause button; the moment’s perfect as it is. Take a photo before the light changes. The light always changes.
The last time I had the thought was on Savile Row; not, historically, much of a food district. But since November it has had Row on 5, a partnership between Jason Atherton and former Ritz man Spencer Metzger. It has won the pair a star already — one of 83 London restaurants with one — and deserves a second. I had not anticipated falling for a fine dining palace; I do not like the usual grey looks, the strangled chatter, the flawless, dead-eyed service. Row has none of that: the main dining room is a looker, slightly Seventies in a Japanese kind of way. It is a room of diners laughing, the waiters cheerful and chattering. Head sommelier Roxane Dupuy is remarkable. The food is extraordinary: late on, two slices of Pyrenees lamb came so perfectly cooked — the meat silky but the fat as crisp and brittle as an imperious aunt — that I wondered if they’d been prepared separately and somehow stitched together. It was a meal of precision, imagination, discipline. But there are other places with similar standards of cooking: what Metzger and Atherton have put the money into is an experience. They have learnt from the other great London restaurants: it is not always about food, but a feeling. Food is forgotten but feelings linger.
