| Bouchon Racine, Farringdon | | by Chris Pople Dec 28, 2022 |
Such is the cyclical nature of these things, trends in food or clothing or plenty of other areas besides will, given long enough, find themselves fading in and out of favour. There was a time, within living memory, when French cuisine was considered the gold standard of achievement in the restaurant world, when Michelin stars were handed out exclusively to places that could demonstrate their ability to construct a decent Tournedos Rossini, and taken back just as quickly if anything on the menu was found to be written in English. There may have been British chefs, and British waiters, and sometimes even British ingredients, but they cooked French food and that was that.
Gradually, beginning most noticeably in the 1980s but accelerating into the 90s and beyond, British cuisine, although very definitely birthed from the French techniques and traditions, began to discover its own identity, and very soon the bright, modern, light flourishes (Rogan et al) or the studied, seasonal rusticism (Henderson) of new wave British cooking all of a sudden made things like Tournedos Rossini look a bit, well, past it. Traditional French restaurant food wasn't suddenly bad, it just looked tired and old fashioned.
It's about time, then, isn't it, for unapologetically French food to make a comeback? Not the heavy, elaborate Escoffier-feasts of the past, not even perhaps Tournedos Rossini, but a style of French cooking that learns from the past while wrapping it up in the kind of experience that makes you want to spend all day there and eat everything on the menu twice. Which brings me on to Bouchon Racine.
First of all, yes I did want to eat everything on the menu twice - even the stuff as a very poor French speaker I initially had to google. But even before making a decision on starters and mains we knew we had to order a plate of Carlingford oysters, absolutely giant things with a clean, minerally taste. This is a great time of year to be eating oysters. They arrived with gordal olives and a deliriously good baguette with salted butter, the suppliers of which had been tapped from Racine's previous Kensington operation back in the day. But more on that side of things later.
Eventually, after much anguishing, I decided I wanted to start the lunch proper with snails, partly because I love snails but also because I can't remember the last time I saw them on a menu. They were fantastic plump, meaty little things in an extremely smooth and enjoyable garlic-butter sauce, sizzling and frothing away straight from the grill.
Other starters were equally brilliant - a steak tartare with a beautifully loose texture studded with capers and shallots...
...Bayonne ham with celeriac remoulade, the celeriac presented in neat little tubes like a vegetable-based bucatini...
...and what was perhaps, amongst some stiff competition, the most exciting and beautiful of the starters, eggs draped in a loose, light "mayonnaise" closer to a Hollandaise and topped with thick, salty cantabrian anchovies.
At this point, Bouchon Racine could have just chucked us the bill and turfed us out onto the street and we would have still considered it a journey worth making, but of course we had more eating to do. Apologies, though, to anyone hoping to see detail on four different main courses because none of us were willing to budge from the main course decision we'd all made as soon as we spotted it on the menu. So behold, four plates of rabbit in mustard sauce. And none of us had any regrets - rabbit with a golden, crisp skin but still boasting juicy flesh right down to the bone, wrapped in bacon (because yes please) and surrounded in a silky, buttery mustard-warmed sauce. Great stuff.
Oh, and creamed spinach with foie gras, because if there's one way of improving creamed spinach it's the addition of foie gras. Look at the colour of it too - like it could replenish your iron levels by just being in the same room.
Desserts were as unapologetically French as everything that had come before. Mont blanc was a giant - and I do mean giant - mound of cream and sweet meringue topped with a bitter walnut paste, which combined to great effect. Tarte vaudoise was a delicate little thing with a rich, buttery flavour that belied its straightforward appearance. And there was of course the famous Racine creme caramel (with added prune), all warm and wobbly and lovely.
The name Racine, though, may not mean much to a lot of you. It was all the way back in 2015 that Henry Harris' flagship operation closed its doors, taking with it a whole generation (or at least blogging generation) of happy memories and steak au poivre dinners, which despite its fans even then felt like the changing of the guard from the French tradition and the refocussing on thrusting young British gastropubs like the Harwood Arms or places like Lyle's which opened around the same time.
But what goes around comes around, and Racine is back, better than ever, and cooking the kind of food you'd wished never went away. Or maybe it never did, and blinded by the new and the fashionable the rotten little trend-chasers like me just never noticed it. Who cares. What matters that it's here now, and it's one of the most exciting and effortlessly enjoyable new (sort of) restaurants in London. Vive la France.
9/10
We turned up quite willing to pay in full, but good old Dave Strauss who's leading front of house gave us a little bloggers bonus on some items, so thanks v much to him for that. | | | |
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