The Times Magazine 67Jacques-Frédéric Mugnier and then a 2009
Château Brane-Cantenac that needed a little
piece of cheese to help us finish it off.
That’s a lunch for me: white burgundy, red
burgundy, claret. All at around a quarter of the
price they would be in a restaurant, if you could
find them, which is to say, the en primeur price
plus a little bit of corkage to cover the excellent,
knowledgeable and rather excitable young
sommelier, who literally ran across the room
with our wines, like the captain’s lad on The
Bounty fearful of another flogging, and the
cost of mousetraps, which I noticed they could
use a couple more of, at the top of the stairs,
on the right, just before the reading room.
“Bloody hell,” said my mate Sid, another
guest. “Clubs must have felt pretty f***ing
amazing when there were no restaurants,
mustn’t they? To be sitting in here, in this
incredible room, with all your mates, eating
great food and getting off your tits on vintage
plonk, while everyone else was home boiling
a weasel or something.”
I had this all fresh in my mind when,
the following day, having shed my suit, tie,
uncomfortable leather shoes and hangover,
I cycled over to Queen’s Park in northwest
London in jeans and a T-shirt (so much more
comfy for eating) for lunch at Carmel, a new
venture from the Katz brothers of Berber & Q,
one of the great disruptor restaurants of recent
years and as different from the Garrick model
as you can get.
Lonsdale Road, the cobbled alley round
the back of the main Salusbury Road drag,
has come up a lot in the world since it was
just Hugo’s café and a lot of garages. It’s got
a buzzy, pleased-with-itself, East Villagey vibe
these days and, leaning my bike against a
planter and sliding through the lunchtime
cocktail drinkers at the sunny tables outside to
the loud, music-filled, delicious-smelling, most
un-Garrick-like interior (bar the communal
table), I felt that melancholy thrill of going
from youngest to oldest man in the house in
a few short hours.
The menu is also a long, long way from the
Woosterisms of clubland: nothing potted or
devilled here, nothing shot, nothing on toast.
Although plenty on squishy Middle Eastern
sourdough from the “Flatbreads” list that
sits between the “Breakfast” and “Lunch”
sections. My friend Jamie and I had one
topped with spiced lamb, Aleppo chilli and
sumac yoghurt (£11) that was blistered black
around the edges like a volcano, encompassing
a caldera of meaty good things and spice,
with a leaf of parsley and an eighth of lemon,
and one that was daintier, with leaves of
thinly sliced, near-raw potato and swirls
of taramasalata (£10).
It was around this point that we finished
our beers and asked after a glass of rosé.
There were four on the menu and I didn’t
recognise any of them, so I asked our friendly,
generous waiter which of them was the palest,
most Provence-like. He suggested one and, in
describing it, said, “It is a natural wine, so...”
“It tastes like cider?” I said, saving him
the trouble of completing his sentence.“No,” he said, meaning, obviously, “Yes.”
“So it is clear and fresh-tasting with a
hint of fruit?”
He brought some for me to try and it
wasn’t. It was cloudy and tasted of cider with a
hint of bins. But I didn’t want cider; I wanted
wine. So I tried another of the rosés, and that
was the same. So I said, forget it, let’s have a
white wine instead, but they were all natural,
“low-intervention” wines too, so I told the
chap to just bring me one of them and lots
of ice to put in it, to take the taste away.
“Which one?” he asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “You and I both
know that they all taste exactly the same and
that in a blind tasting you’d be just as happy
swallowing the contents of the spittoon, so
bring whichever comes out of the fridge first
and we’ll say no more about it.”
So he did, and we did. And with it we ate
the prettiest, most pellucid raw red prawns,
half-peeled (£16), with a fermented chilli oil,
little Tropea onion slices and leaves of wild
garlic; charred hispi cabbage with ras el
hanout and macadamia dukka (£9.90), a
schmear of hummus with lamb ragu, pistachio
and curry leaf (£7.70), and it was all, obviously,
so much more brightly coloured, snappy,
directional and modern than my shrimps
on toast and glazed calf’s pancreas of the day
before but, oh, what I would have given to be
drinking it with one of the Garrick’s smooth,
elegant, traditionally made white wines of
good vintage, instead of this vinegar in wine’s
clothing, this, this, this Emperor’s New Piss.
Is it a conspiracy? Does anyone really
think this stuff is delicious? I don’t see how
they could. For a start, how can you tell when
it’s gone off, seeing as it already tastes the
way proper wine does when it’s dead? It’s all
like a decent bottle of white, recorked and left
in a cupboard for cooking, then forgotten, that
referments after a couple of months and blows
the cork out in the night.
In the end, I think it must be an age thing,
like the trans debate. Young people (at least
the ones with progressive ideas) think this
stuff is definitely wine and should be called
“wine”. And old people – say, people over
40 – respect its right to exist, and for it to
pretend to be wine if it wants to. We will even
agree that some of it does look and act a bit
like wine. But it isn’t wine. And never will
be. Not biologically. And we will never accept
that it is. But there is no point arguing about it,
because nobody on either side wants to listen.
So we just have to hope that it is we, and not
they, who are on the right side of history. nCarmel
23-25 Lonsdale Road,
London NW6
(020 3848 2090;
carmelrestaurant.co.uk)
Cooking 8
Vibes 9
Wine 4
Score 7