The Times Magazine 61voiceover I had booked in for the following
morning and set about looking for an improving
day trip my firstborn and I could do together
that would give us loads to talk about and be
way more fun than some stupid video game.
So I suggested the Dickens Museum to her.
“Sure.”
“It’s in the actual house where he wrote
Oliver Twist!”
“Okay.”
“I mean, what an amazing coincidence,
when we’re halfway through it at this very
moment. We can walk there along the route
Oliver and the Dodger took into the city to
meet Fagin after they met up in Barnet: down
through Camden – where Bob Cratchit lived!
- and along Gray’s Inn Road to Doughty
Street. They’ve got the desk he wrote it at!
And his bed! And then, I tell you what, we
can go and have lunch at a restaurant called
Simpson’s Tavern that’s been there since 1757,
where Dickens probably ate. It’s the last actual
chophouse in England. They serve stewed
cheese and... Kitty?
“Yeah, Dad?”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m turning my iPad on because it’s 7pm,
and 7pm is iPad time. But that all sounds
great, Dad. Brilliant. Oliver Twist, bed, 1757,
cheese, got it. Can’t wait.”
And it bloody was brilliant too. And Kitty
knew it when we got there, but just didn’t
want to show it. It’s an amazing Georgian
townhouse, refurbished to look exactly as it
did in 1837, with Dickens’ actual dinner table
laid with his own crockery, and then a
beautifully reconstructed kitchen downstairs,
and scullery – with a “copper” for washing
laundry, just like the one the Cratchits cook
their Christmas pudding in – and all of it
tending to remind one how important food was
to Dickens: the pork pie Pip steals for Magwitch,
the “crumb of cheese” that Scrooge accuses
Marley’s ghost of being, Guppy’s lobster and
lettuce in Bleak House, Oliver’s gruel...
He was obsessed with food, perhaps because
he was so poor in his youth and thought
endlessly of it, and plumbs it for satire and
metaphor (the broken wine cask in A Tale of
Two Cities whose contents the peasants lap
up from the cobbles; the turkey that seals
the redemption of Scrooge) in ways that Jane
Austen, say, did not. Nor the Brontës nor
George Eliot. I suppose Thackeray did, but
he was just a rich glutton – more in the Coren
mould – so doesn’t really count.
Aaaaaanyway, it was all making us rather
hungry, so after a quick game of life-size,
Oliver-themed Snakes and Ladders (leaping
from square to square in the attic to the
roll of a giant dice, until Kitty – a little put
out by the spoiler – landed on square 100,
marked “Finish. Mr Brownlow has adopted
you!”), we headed for Simpson’s on foot along
Clerkenwell Road – just like Oliver and the
Dodger before us – then down Hatton Garden
near the site of Fagin’s house – Kitty sucking
her thumb, as bored with my tour as you are,
waiting, like you, for the food – up Cornhill,
past the Royal Exchange, where the Ghost of
Christmas Yet to Come showed Scrooge the
men joking about his recent death – and then
right down moody little Birchin Lane, ancient
as hell, to Simpson’s Tavern, a piece of history
not dead but ruddily alive.
It was just as it was when I was last here,
15 years ago, and for 250 years before that:
a meandering, red-walled beehive of brass
and polished wood, full of plain, ordinary men,
eating plain, ordinary food, in tight booths on
narrow benches (measured to the smaller,
18th-century arse) and, yes, a couple of ordinary
women too – they were finally admitted in 1916.As, at some subsequent point, were ten-year-
old girls. Because when I called to book and
warned them about my companion, they were
delighted to accommodate her, saying only
that they had best not put us at a communal
table for fear the language of their regulars
offend her little ears. I told them my own
anxieties were very much the other way round.
The upstairs dining room being closed
for reasons of heavily reduced pandemic
footfall (the City was scandalously empty
on a working Wednesday), we took our place
downstairs in the bustling little room, presided
over by the formidable Tina and a smart
young helper whose name I didn’t catch.
The menu is cheap, with starters such as a
mushroom pâté at £5.75, chicken liver pâté at
£6.25, and smoked salmon and brown bread at
£8.75. Then, from the grill, butterflied chicken
breast for £10, rump steak and Barnsley chop
both just under £14 and the “Edwardian” pork
chop at £14.85.
Kitty had the rump, very rare, with chips
(£4) and rolled her eyes with pleasure. It was,
indeed, excellent: tarry with grill flavour, thick,
juicy, not overhung, a good, old-fashioned
steak and probably half the price of its swanky
gentrified gastropub equivalent – in the heart
of the City! The chips were fat, presumablyThe celebrated stewed
cheese is a ramekin of
mustardy sauce to be
spilt onto white toast
bought in, a bit floury, but fine. Kitty politely
declined the offer of a sausage on the side,
which, by tradition, Tina is compelled to offer
with every main.
I had a steak and kidney pudding (£11.75) so
old-school it lacked only a mortarboard and
inkwell. Served in a white bowl with a firm,
smashable lid somewhere between shortcrust
and suet pastry, it was brimful of grey-brown
gravy and simply rammed with kidney, the
high smell leaping out as I forked into the
pastry and filling my head with happiness.
The meat was plain chuck steak – tender and
sweet – but the kidneys were clearly of lamb,
being small and sweet and grassily aromatic.
My bubble and squeak (£4) was just frozen bag
veg stirred into mash and left under lights, but
it soaked up the ripe, tangy gravy ever so well.
For pudding, Kitty devoured a cinnamon
apple crumble with hot custard (which to me
had a very slight scent of swimming pools) and
said, “It’s even better than school,” and I had
a ramekin of their celebrated stewed cheese, a
mustardy cheese sauce to be spilt onto white
toast and used as a foil to the last of whatever
perfectly ordinary red you had with your meat.
God, it’s wonderful. You don’t have to have
done an hour in the Dickens Museum to relish
this place, but it helps. It locates you right in
an old English tradition of food that you have
to be hungry for. This place, if it were bought
by hipsters and modernised, would die. Well,
it might well thrive, but it would be dead to
me. They would hang the steak for 60 days
then slow-cook it over Indonesian binchotan
charcoal and charge £45 a piece. They’d posh
up the steak and kidney gravy, then take the
kidneys out and roll it in a fancy suet crust
with a sprig of holly on top for Instagram. The
wine would be natural and cloudy and taste of
Sarson’s. They’d tell you what stupid endangered
apple variety they’d used in the crumble.
What I love is that its vibe is richly ancient
without the alienating thrum of privilege. It’s
the wood, brass and red paint of the Lyons’
Corner House or guildhall rather than the
Pall Mall club or Oxford college. It’s very
smart in an urgent, clerical, Cockney, rooted
way. It’s the very best of old London Town.
And if Dickens never really came here, well,
he was an even bigger fool than I thought. nSimpson’s Tavern
Ball Court, 38½ Cornhill, London EC3
(020 7626 9985; simpsonstavern.co.uk)
Food 6
Service 10
Location 10
History 10
Vibes 10
Score 9.2
Price As above.Eating out Giles Coren