Not really a review at all, just an enthusiastic report back from an unexpectedly remarkable afternoon.
I needed a venue for a lunchtime meeting. It looked like being a sunny day, the first one for a while, so I looked at my notebook, at this list of places I have in mind. There on the list was Parson’s in Endell St. I reviewed it a few years ago for the FT. It was lovely. I never seemed to find the time to go back. So I clicked on the website and, mirabile dictu, they had a table at 1.30.
Already. This is looking unusual. So I turned up, smartly dressed, method of payment in hand, met my guest and we went in.
It was just... well lovely really. It was full... not rammed, but pleasantly full. There were people sitting out in the new, sort of shack they’ve got out on the pavement. There were couples eating at the weirdly idiosyncratic ‘inside/outside’ tables built across the windowsills. There were staff. A sufficient number. Bright, engaged... knowing enough aboutthe job to leave you the hell alone when you didn’t need them and then suddenly cropping up like a silent wraith when you did.
The place is an old shopfront which, at some point, someone’s tiled.
‘Fuck. Said my guest. This is could be Paris’. Which was partly true. Parisian it certainly is, I’m just not sure Paris is still this good.
It’s bright with sunlight, full of happy people and the menu is sensational.
In The Beginning, there were martinis.
I had a pile of cured anchovies, enlivened with slices of sweet-pickled chillies. We shared a fritto misto which I think has forever moved the goalposts for me on fried fish. One huge prawn (I ate the shell, the batter was so good, and sucked the head like some kind of parasitical alien brain-felcher). Squares of squid of as tender as a putti’s buttock and pieces of mackerel so fresh from the coast they still had sand in their shoes.
The batter, it seemed, ran heavy to cornmeal or polenta, so there was a heft to it. Tempura’s all very well but it stands apart from the business in hand, protesting its neutrality like bloody Switzerland. I grew up on Carolina crabshacks, I came of culinary age in an oyster bar in Louisiana. I like batter thats not scared to get involved.
Parson’s has small plates. I like that. Not ‘small plates’ like ‘Before you order can I just explain the concept. We’re a small plates...” <Reaches down beside chair, lifts suppressed Glock out of bag and quietly racks the slide> No they serve on modest sized plates. Just the right size for a proper but not immodest adult portion. Something that a man planning four courses, spread over a leisurely afternoon can work with.
I hate the word ‘perfect’ but here it’s merely a mathematical or philosophical statement rather than an aesthetic one. The size was precisely correct. Perfect.
For main I had a piece of wild sea bass with a piece of braised fennel and a langoustine sauce that managed to extract everything that’s good about a langoustine and play it back through the medium of cream. Seriously. The whole thing. Salt sea tang, the bitter umami of seared chitin from a barbecued shell, sweet meat and funky brain goo... all of it in a pink ointment. The bass had been thoughtfully butchered. A square fillet, the skin crisp, and slashed to reveal a heathy layer of brown subcutaneous fishfat. The kind of stuff mimsy cooks pare away to leave an anodyne protein block for soulless diners. Quite simply this was cooked by somebody who likes fish. Sounds daft but it’s vanishingly rare.
Business was concluded quickly and satisfactorily. Gears changed.
I decided to skip dessert because the afternoon was slipping gloriously away and this was feeling more and more like droppining through a wormhole in space/time to a place when going out for lunch was a joy rather than a massive ballache.
I have no time for the idiotic ‘five cheese plate’ Doctrine of the Davidian Era. It’s stupid overkill. For a long time, I cleaved to the Hendersonian Orthodoxy of a single, superb cheese, curated and presented like a holy object. No... I’d forgotten how really good Brie de Meaux can be. I’d shamefully dropped my friendship with Bleu d’Auvergne. A seductively silky, creamy washed rind and a complex, nutty but not fighty blue. Have a Comté on a separate plate somewhere else. Melt your Baron Bigod in its box, but a two-piece post prandial cheeseplate achieves a kind of ‘form-follows-function’ Modernist intellectual purity in a Brie-n-Bleu. Only a churl would disagree. Nothing else is needed save maybe some bread... and...
“How about a digestif? There’s a bar over there.”
And so there was. On the other side of the sunny intersection was Parson’s louche little sister, Baudry Greene. I’ve also reviewed BG - extremely positively - in the past. It’s also got it exactly right. The kind of slightly theatrical mise-en-scene that delights me. There are tables outside. People chatting, drinking laughing. Nobody queuing... nobody fucking influencing anybody. I bumped into a friend. It was like the most natural thing in the world.
It was the street I’d always dreamed of living on... maybe in Paris in 1950 or Florence. Soho in one of its cycles of being pretty good. Maybe Greenwich Village in the late 70s. A place you could drop into your local, have an exceptional meal, then go and sit around in a corner bar with outdoor tables and piss away the afternoon with a mate you ran into. Maybe write a book… make a film…
The sun continued to shine. It was the first perfect afternoon of summer. I looked at my receipts. All this looks like it cost about as much as it would have done a decade ago. The barman, it turned out, liked Daiquiris as much as we did. I got home around 8.00, walking on air... abrim with joy. I had a wonderful afternoon
I don’t live on a street like this.
I wish with all my heart that I did.
What joy!!
Wonderful post, thank you. Parsons is great.