Mario Bautista
First things first, I did not see a single phone at Toklas. Not one. The sight was staggering, thrilling and somewhat disappointing to a restaurant critic who has recently described smartphones as a ubiquitous blight on modern restaurants and called for them to be banned.
I hadn’t deliberately picked a place that I thought might be phone-free either, just to illustrate a point. I had merely selected what I hoped would be an excellent, grown-up, special-feeling sort of a restaurant to give lunch to a man who had donated an enormous amount of money to charity for the privilege, and the duchess he was bringing along for company.
And perhaps that is exactly why there were no phones: the mere fact of Toklas being such a grown-up and proper place, with “Starters” and “Mains” rather than “Big plates” and “Small plates”, and having been open for a couple of years now, so not being full of international travelling phone boobies more interested in filming their lunch than eating it.
Mozzarella di bufala with black figs, rocket and pine nuts
Whatever it was, this grand phonelessness gave Toklas a 10/10 for “atmosphere” straight out of the traps, and an early chance of a very high total score indeed. Which might have come as a surprise to the critics who bounded along here in its opening days and, while delighting in the quality of the food and service, decried the “utilitarian space” attached to a “monolithic block” reminiscent of a “café attached to an out-of-town retail park” and “more Soviet bus stop than warm hostelry”.
“Oh my God,” I muttered under my breath on the Northern Line as I headed south towards Embankment, flicking through the reviews for the first time only now, having booked on the basis of oral hearsay. “I’ve invited a duchess to some Bolshevik killing dungeon! It’ll be Ekaterinburg all over again. They’ll put her and her rich philanthropist friend, and possibly even me, up against the grey concrete wall of their dreary lubyanka and shoot us all.”
Or, worse still, serve us natural wine, which, I also discovered only minutes before arriving, is all they have on the list. So that would be me, a duchess and her monocled walker, swilling cider in a grain silo for the afternoon, possibly in front of a firing squad. Terrific.
They were all already in situ (always keep a duchess waiting, that’s what my momma told me) when I dived in through the densely forested, sun-drenched (utterly lovely) terrace, and were looking very happy indeed. They had a bit of a corridor table, but it was a gentle oval banked by a plush green banquette and surrounded by bright, colourful modern art (Toklas is owned by the founders of Frieze London) in a sunny, parquet-floored set of rooms that filled gradually as the lunch shift progressed.
Mussels escabeche “with sweet, floral-scented carrots and warm, freshly made potato crisps”
There was Henry Dimbleby, co-founder of Chefs in Schools, whose mission is to “transform child health, school by school, plate by plate”, Tim Ashley, whom I won’t embarrass by saying how much he had paid for this lunch except to say that it was only three grand shy of my first year’s salary at The Daily Telegraph, and his landlady, the Duchess of Richmond, châtelaine of Goodwood in West Sussex (fast horses and faster cars), whom I will hereinafter refer to as “Janet” but you had better call “Your Grace” until she tells you otherwise.
To oil the wheels, I asked our lovely waitress if they had any wine that actually tasted like wine to start us off with, and she said they did, although they always say that. So I pointed to a Portuguese albariño called Vale da Capucha (£79) and asked if it was clean and crisp and smooth. And she said it was. I asked if you could see through it, and she said you could. But when it came you could see through it only in the sense that you can see through a frosted toilet door. And just as when you look through a frosted toilet door, there was piss on the other side. Utter piss. “It’s the last bottle we have,” she said as she poured it. “Thank God for that,” I replied.
Janet had never tasted anything like this before and took some persuading that it was wine at all. Tim had, and he didn’t like it. But Henry is in food and tried to be kind. He reckoned that when the worst of the funky, bummy aroma had breathed off in the glass, this stuff tasted almost as nice as a cheap scrumpy. The food, on the other hand, was incredible.
“Produce-driven” always sounds like such a load of tosh but late summer fruits drove the first courses beautifully. There was buffalo mozzarella with lovely ripe figs, rocket and pine nuts; chunks of yellow peach with bobby beans, almonds and olive oil; and wild sea bass crudo with bottarga and crushed honeycomb tomatoes whose juices and flesh had bonded with olive oil to make a sort of jelly that shimmered over the raw fish. Dazzling.
Wild sea bass crudo with bottarga “and crushed honeycomb tomatoes whose juices and flesh had bonded with olive oil to make a sort of jelly that shimmered over the raw fish. Dazzling”
There were mussels escabeche with sweet, floral-scented carrots and warm, freshly made potato crisps; perfectly seasoned pork tonnato with dark brown salty anchovies and agretti (which is what the Italians call monk’s beard) and four morning-fresh, chargrilled sardines with gremolata — like an impromptu Cornish beach barbecue transplanted to central London. Plus very accomplished sourdough from the Toklas bakery next door.
Halfway through, another lady came and asked how everything was and we said, “Lovely, apart from the wine,” so she said, “Hang on,” and brought us a bottle of Nerthus Bourgogne aligoté (£78) that she swore blind we would recognise as wine. And this time we did. It was genuinely nice, no word of a lie, you could see right through it, just like with proper wine, and we all cried, “Hurrah!” and clinked our glasses with relief.
Then came a genuinely undrinkable red. You couldn’t swallow it without winking one eye. But we groaned and pleaded and so they brought us a La Plante Burgundy pinot noir (£89) that was quite delicious. I don’t know why they can’t do that at the first time of asking. But they never do in these places. Either they are so far gone into the natural wine delusion that they really cannot tell what is wine and what isn’t, or they just want us to like this evil stuff so much that they are going to keep on at it until we yield.
And then more deliriously good food. For me, a wobbling lozenge of grilled hake with borlotti beans, peppers and thick, yellow aïoli. For Henry, a vegetarian cousin of that dish, involving courgettes with coco beans, Taggiasche olives and rocket, which he said was fantastic. There was ravioli for the duchess, with Westcombe ricotta, spinach and Scottish girolles. The pasta parcels and golden ’shrooms looked absolutely delicious, but I don’t know what it tasted like, because you don’t just reach over and prong a raviolo off a duchess’s plate. It’s not done. It’s right there in Burke’s, page 11,409. Nor do you ask her how it is, because that’s vulgar. I’ve seen Downton.
“The duchess had ravioli with Westcombe ricotta, spinach and girolles. It looked delicious, but I don’t know what it tasted like, because you don’t just reach over and prong a raviolo off a duchess’s plate”
Tim had rabbit saltimbocca with braised chard and Amalfi lemon that looked stunning: a whole boned leg, shrink-wrapped in pancetta. And as a fifth main, to be on the safe side, I ordered a plate of bigoli with San Marzano tomatoes and basil. It was a wondrously chewy, long pasta from Veneto, reminiscent of Tuscan pici, and the sauce was made from confit tomatoes with tinned tomatoes and tomato paste, the olive oil just breaking out at points and gleaming in seams on the top. A not untomatoey experience.
There was also a Sutton Farm salad of huge, ferrous leaves, really good chips and then a standout pre-dessert (I originally thought, “Oh no, a bloody sorbet”) of densely purple blackcurrant ice cream that was so seasonally precise, to the very minute, that I almost cried.
Then came a tremendous caramel ice cream scraped casually onto the edge of a steel dish and a stonking chocolate cremosa (eggless, made with olive oil) with Amarena cherries and crème fraîche, which was almost savoury in its seriousness.
Finally, there arrived a not inconsiderable bill from which they had very sweetly removed those two terrible wines. But we had ordered them in the full knowledge that we’d probably hate them, and we had drunk them even though we did. So they didn’t have to do that. For the absence of smartphones alone, even without the enchanting cooking, had already convinced me that Toklas is very much on the side of the angels.
Toklas
1 Surrey Street, London WC2 (020 3930 8592; toklaslondon.com)
Vibes (phonelessness) 10
Cooking 9
Wine 5
Score 8
Price £100/head. Or £70/head if you don’t drink (which I’d probably advise).
