The Economist - UK (2022-02-19)

78 Culture The Economist February 19th 2022

Worldina dish

Closer to the bone

I

t isnearly 30 yearssinceStJohnopened

in  a  former  smokehouse,  just  to  the

north of the City of London. Back then, the

restaurant  felt  daringly  stark:  white­

washed  walls  and  concrete  floors,  drinks

specials  on  chalkboards,  a  high­ceilinged

dining  room  with  white  tablecloths  and

wooden chairs, no music. After the pastel­

coloured  1980s,  it  seemed  to  smack  of  the

mortuary  or  the  operating  theatre.  Today

the decor is reassuringly unaltered.

So is the food. St John’s menu changes

daily, but its style is constant—what Fergus

Henderson, its co­founder, calls “a kind of

British  cooking”.  It  became  famous  in  the

early  noughties,  when  the  late  Anthony

Bourdain,  an  American  chef,  author  and

television  presenter,  rhapsodised  over  its

roast  bone  marrow  salad.  That  is  the  only

dish that almost never leaves the menu, for

good reason: it is a symphony of unctuous­

ness (marrow), brightness (a parsley, caper

and  shallot  salad),  salinity  (a  mound  of

grey sea salt) and crunch (toast), which the

diner composes himself. Marrow and oth­

er  offal  favoured  by  Mr  Henderson  began

appearing on menus of fashionable restau­

rants from Seattle to Melbourne.

The  offal  fad  competed  with  one  for

molecular gastronomy, with its spheres of

olive juice, then gave way to farm­to­table

cooking, which painstakingly detailed the

provenance  of  every  radish  in  a  salad.

Eventually  came  the  narrative­driven

cooking of today, in which each dish has its

culturally  appropriate  origin  story.  The

marrow is still on the menu at St John.

Yet while the offal grabs the headlines,

MrHenderson’skindofBritish cooking ul­

timately rests on bold, unfussy simplicity.

It  is  a  cold­weather  translation  of  Italian

country  cooking,  with  high­quality  meat

and vegetables simply prepared. The menu

is  laconic  (“Snails  and  Oakleaf”),  flavours

strong and balanced, presentation a flour­

ish  above  plain.  Mr  Henderson  now  has

Parkinson’s  disease  and  no  longer  cooks,

but the restaurant hews to his vision.

In a mercurial industry, that is rare. Far

too  many  posh  metropolitan  restaurants

share  a  dreary,  trendy  predictability,  sup­

plying  the  same  gently  upbeat  music,  the

same  mixture  of  vaguely  Italianate  and

East  Asian  dishes,  and  excessively  busy

cocktails with poetic or suggestive names.

There  is  nothing  inherently  wrong  with

that. Everyone wants to succeed, and these

things  sell.  Castigating  restaurateurs  for

offering  them  is  as  silly  as  berating  direc­

tors for making superhero films. But while

predictable  restaurants  and  superhero

movies  can  be  successful,  and  sometimes

even good, they cannot be truly great.

Not every singular vision succeeds, or is

worth  pursuing  in  the  first  place.  Stub­

bornness  and  greatness  are  not  the  same

thing.  But—as  every  would­be  novelist

turned  lawyer  or  sculptor  turned  dentist

knows—such  dreams  are  all  too  easy  to

abandon  out  of  fear  of  failure.And  more

than most businesses, restaurants tend to

fail. To open one that goes against the grain

is a risk. To find that same restaurant little

changed, still packed with dinersand still

delicious  after  more  than  aquarter  of  a

century is a quiet cause for joy. n

In the fickle world of restaurants, sticking to a vision takes guts

Artisanalpottery

Glaze of glory

C

hallenged by afriend  to  replicate  a

piece of shimmering Babylonian earth­

enware, Mary Chase Perry had an idea. The

ceramicist decided to fire her pieces three

times,  adding  a  spray  of  kerosene  for  the

final blast: the oil burst into flames, com­

busting with the metal oxides in the glaze

to create a swirl of metallic colours. In 1903,

the  same  year  Henry  Ford  established  his

motor company in Detroit, Perry co­found­

ed a small pottery studio in the city. By 1909

she had perfected the iridescent glaze and

the  process  of  “fuming”  that  became  the

studio’s trademark.

The  fortunes  of  Pewabic  Pottery—

named  after  an  old  copper  mine  near  her

birthplace—have  since  reflected  those  of

Detroit  itself.  Perry’s  workshop,  which

fashioned  handmade,  delicate  wares,

could  not  have  been  more  different  from

Ford’s  vast  factory  and  its  assembly­line

production.  But  as  Steve  McBride,  Pewab­

ic’s current boss, notes, the midwestern ci­

ty  “has  always  been  a  place  of  parallel

tracks”. The workshop was an integral part

of  America’s  Arts  and  Crafts  movement,  a

backlash  against  mechanisation  that  be­

gan in the late 19th century. Yet those tracks

sometimes  intersected.  Albert  Kahn,  who

designed the earliest Ford factories, deco­

rated the interiors with Pewabic ceramics. 

Ford  helped  to  bring  people,  and

wealth, to the city in the early 20th century.

Architects  designed  stunning  Beaux­Arts

and  Art  Deco  buildings,  including  one  for

the Detroit Institute of Arts that opened in

1927,  and  the  majestic  Guardian  Building

(pictured), built in 1929; both were adorned

D ETROIT

The story of a pottery is intertwined

with the history of its city