[Lifestyle] Bouchon Racine, London: ‘I am a huge, dribbling admirer’ – restaurant review

[INTOXICADOS]

This classic bistro offers a masterclass in French cooking – and that’s a totally unbiased opinion

Jay Rayner
Jay Rayner
Sun 15 Jan 2023 06.00 GMT
508
Bouchon Racine, 66 Cowcross Street, London EC1M 6BP (020 7253 3368). Starters £8.50-£16.50, mains £17.50-£48, desserts £6.50-£9, wines from £25.50

There are film critics who, presented with a Martin Scorsese movie, can be guaranteed to rave. There are theatre critics who will be bucket-full of puppyish love when writing about any musical by Stephen Sondheim. This is the restaurant review equivalent. The only argument for me not reviewing the newly opened Bouchon Racine is that I am a huge, dribbling admirer of all the people involved and all the food they serve. In other words, because I was stone cold certain in advance that the restaurant would be very good indeed and because I was proved absolutely right, I shouldn’t say so as I have already shown myself to be compromised, courtesy of my deep experience and overwhelming, impeccable good taste. Yeah, right.

So here it is: Bouchon Racine is everything. It is the joyful rebirth of chef Henry Harris’s restaurant Racine, a once greatly adored bistro on London’s Brompton Road, which opened in 2002. Harris, who was part of Simon Hopkinson’s first brigade at Bibendum, wanted, after a less happy journey around kitchens in thrall to fashion, to open a restaurant serving the kind of classic French dishes he loved. He wanted to do indecently good things with butter and cream and the inner bits of the animal from which too many people recoil. His menu there was an unashamed celebration of the bourgeois, marinated in the very best of Bordeaux, fair doused in Armagnac.

Racine, which means root, was meant to be a neighbourhood restaurant, but by 2015 there was not much of a neighbourhood left. Too many people had treated property less as a home than an investment. Harris moved on. He brought a little of his Francophile magic to a bunch of pubs and, along the way, for the sake of full disclosure, cooked the last supper for the end of my book of that name, in a room above one of them. We ate very well that night.Now he has teamed up with Dave Strauss, another industry veteran, with a gift for service and a beard that Zeus himself must envy. I have many reasons to adore Strauss, beyond the fact that he makes good service look effortless. He was general manager of the hilarious Beast in 2014 when I wrote an excoriating review. I argued that the steaks were so expensive, “they should lead the damn animal into the restaurant and install it under the table so it can pleasure me while I eat.” Strauss responded on Twitter: “Fellating cows already en route to restaurant.” He ran Goodman and Zelman Meats before a stint in the West Country with the chef Mitch Tonks.

Together, Harris and Strauss have now taken over the Three Compasses opposite London’s Farringdon station. Downstairs is the pub where they sell pints of Moretti. Upstairs is the dining room, with its glass-ceilinged conservatory area at the front. It used to be a Thai place. The red carpet has been replaced by dark varnished floorboards. The walls are the deepest shade of Jersey cream, and the menu is a scribbled blackboard of true loveliness, which changes depending on what’s available.

Start with oysters from Carlingford or silken slices of nutty jambon noir de Bigorre from the Hautes-Pyrénées, with fat the colour of antique crockery. Drape that across chunks of baguette smeared with the best funky salted butter. Hold a bit of the bread back to swish through the hot brown butter with salty-sour capers bathing two lobes of calves’ brains, impeccably cooked so that the outside is crisp and the inside pearly white. Too rich for your blood? Too cerebral? Have the chicken liver pâté, coarse cut and earthy and reminiscent of the Jewish way with chopped livers. Or have dense, tensed pieces of herring with potato salad dressed with slivers of carrot and ribbons of acidulated onion and the best peppery olive oil. Swoon a little. Take a sip of your well-priced Côtes du Rhône. Centre yourself for what is to come.

 

 

link: https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/jan/15/bouchon-racine-london-i-am-a-huge-dribbling-admirer-restaurant-review