The Times Magazine 69also he isn’t drinking at the moment, so I didn’t
either. Rendering the chances of postprandial
rumpy pretty much zero.
Now. Serious for a minute. Apricity is one
of those places that tries to do the right thing,
all of the time. I do not need to go into the
laborious detail. But you remember back when
restaurants just didn’t give a shit, so I started
scoring them out of ten for the sourcing
of their meat and fish, their treatment of
staff, the provision of tap water, community
engagement, waste management and all
of that, and made it a large factor of my
overall score? No? Well, I’m going back
a bit. You possibly weren’t born. But where
I led, others followed. Restaurants began
to change the way they did things, and now
we’re getting places like Apricity, which is
London’s second zero-waste restaurant (after
Silo, which I reviewed when it was still in
Brighton), and is wearing its virtue lightly
enough that it will gain top marks from most
guests without their even knowing how much
good they’re doing.
Mayfair might seem an odd place for such
extreme greenness and locavorism, but that
stuff costs money, and money is what they
have round here. The place looks both Prime
London and Peak Crusty at the same time,
with the plaster stripped off and the bare
walls having a travertine pinkness that feels
positively Roman, while the wiring has been
chased in and then covered with filler and
not even sanded. As if the great banqueter
Trimalchio had moved to Homerton or
Bethnal Green. A feature wall that appears
to have been fashioned from repurposed
Jenga blocks turns out to have been built using
sawed-down pieces of the old staircase.
We were served by the general manager,
Beth Morgan-Jones, an Imperial College
London physics graduate who, with head
chef Eve Seemann (Sorbonne: philosophy and
cinema), is part of a formidable triumvirate,
formed at their previous restaurant, Tredwells
(recipient of a green Michelin star in 2021),
that will kick the industry’s arse into a new
future with every passing day of the coming
decades, you mark my words.
Jim and I were invited to scan the QR
code on a coaster for our menus “to avoid
wasting paper”, but I pointed out that even
a digital download has a carbon footprint,
however minuscule, so the best thing would
be for Beth to tell us what was on them, orally,
which she did, including literally every place
and person that had brought each ingredient
to life, usually from not more than about a
mile away. Well, ten miles.
As we weren’t drinking, we decided to get
our fun from the full seven-course tasting
menu, which Beth assured us could be done
in less than two hours, easy. So we drank
our delicious, fruity Virgin Marys, made
from yellow tomatoes for a Heston-like
colour-flavour disengagement, with a cracking
little onion doughnut, dark brown and
warm, jam-filled, unexpectedly bold and
hefty and deliciously redolent of football
burgers slathered in fried onions.
Next up was braised ox tongue (more or
less a waste product these days, and thus both
cheap and virtuous) in an aromatic broth with
spring vegetables, including pickled turnips.The tongue, lest you blench, was sliced very
thin for the benefit of anyone who doesn’t like
the idea of chewing through a whole actual
tongue in a mouth already full of their own.
Which is surely everyone?
And then crispy summer mushrooms of
various types, from a guy in north London
who doesn’t grow mushrooms on peat, as
everybody else does, because peat should
be out there in the peatlands, capturing CO 2.
I asked Beth what this guy grew them on
instead and when she said, “Pretty much
anything,” I decided to press no further,
because what you don’t know can’t... you
know... gross you out. But they were crunchy
and warm and cast a rainbow of browns on
their smoked hemp cream (subs: please insert
hemp-smoking gag here) and shiny dots of
black garlic ketchup.
Then the star of the show: a whole London
red Butterhead lettuce salad, washed and
dried, obviously, but not pulled apart, simply
dressed with golden dots of miso aïoli, white
wild garlic flowers, ruby red semi-dried cherry
tomatoes, glistening emerald puffs of crispy
kale, roasted seeds of burnished copper...
It was like a jewelled faerie crown swiped
from the dressing table in Titania’s boudoir.
Honestly, the most beautiful salad I’ve ever
seen. And absolutely delicious too.
Then it was Devon pork presa (that
sweet, tender, underused and now incredibly
fashionable muscle between the shoulder and
the loin) with a smoked emulsion that gave it
the hipsterish coal flavour we all so crave these
days, wild garlic, purple sprouting broccoli and
leaves of an unnamed offal that Beth invited
me to guess at. I got the correct answer, heart,
at the fourth time of asking. But I feel that
my first three attempts, “eye”, “bollock” and
“spleen”, were easily worth half a point each.
There was Baron Bigod cheese for Jim,
which was wonderfully rich and buttery,
while I chose the vegan cashew cheese.
Something I will never do again. Followed
by a vegan dark chocolate pudding with
honeycomb made from golden syrup. To
avoid the exploitation of bees, obviously.
Although I personally think any self-respecting
worker bees would be, like, “We’ve made all
this delicious natural honey full of all good
things and antioxidants and I don’t know
what, and you’re eating that refined shit
with its historical links to slavery?” If I were
you, and wasn’t vegan, I’d have the glorious
“Chouxnut, Mairac apple, Alexander, double
cream” instead, for it is a truly historic dessert.
It’s all historic, in fact. And, let’s hope, a bit
of a turning point. Another Apricity with its
eye on the next generation. nApricity
68 Duke Street, London
W1 (020 8017 2780;
apricityrestaurant.com)
Cooking 8
Location 8
Fertility 10
Score 8.67
Price Three-course
set lunch, £35;
seven-course tasting
menu, £80