Anchor & Hope
36 The Cut, SE1; 020 7928 9898 Lunch, Tue-Sat, noon-2.30pm; dinner, Mon-Sat, 6-10.30pm I’ve spent more time in pubs than in any other public building. More than in restaurants or cinemas, theatres or magistrates’ courts, libraries, museums or churches. More than in all of them put together. That’s an amazing testimony to the power of the pub — and a savage indictment of my social sophistication.
My abiding memory of pubs is not the Hogarthian jostle, the elbow-nudge and spittle-spray or the claggy dampness that implies every surface is the sickly skin of some giant comatose creature. It isn’t the bellowed bollocks, the charmless flirting or the desperate, choking camaraderie with geezers whose surnames I never knew, but whose girlfriends I’d shagged.
No, my abiding memory of pubs is the wide open emptiness, the motes drifting in the cue of sunlight above the pool table, the luke-bile gag of the first rinsing mouthful of beer and the fingered and folded Daily Mails, passed from bacon-smoked hand to redundant hand. “’Ere, you went to boarding school. What’s the capital of Nigeria? Five letters. First letter K ... Bugger. That means w**ker’s wrong.”
Some — actually, lots of — people have asked me why I spent so much time in pubs. The answer is that I was a drunk, and that’s where drunks go. But that’s only half an answer. One of the few perks of being a full-time professional drunk is that you can do it almost anywhere — benches, emergency stairs in multistorey car parks, other people’s spare rooms. And yet I would assiduously get up every morning and go to a pub, the way my grandfather went to the bank. I was never late and I never took a day off sick. I’d sit and wait till they rang bells and threw me out.
It’s the waiting I remember most vividly; waiting for something to happen. The pub was a metaphysical airport lounge and, standing at the bar, I was like those drivers with a passenger’s name scribbled on cardboard. I stood there for years with this invisible sign that just said: “Anyone. Anywhere.” At the core of the Wagnerian despair of your committed drunk, there is a Micawberish glimmer that something will turn up.
It’s a long time since I’ve been to a pub with intent. Like all folk who make, or are forced to make, life-fracturing decisions — the defrocked priest, the refrocked transsexual, the refugee, the divorcee — I’m ambivalent about the rooms I’ve left behind. Going into a pub is like revisiting the scene of a crime, being both victim and perpetrator. One of the things I hated at the time was any confusion of the pubbiness of pubs; the trendy pretence that the pub might be a family recreation lounge, a French-ish boules park, a part-time disco, a Cuban cocktail bar or, worse — much worse — a restaurant.
Food and pubs go together like frogs and lawnmowers, vampires and tanning salons, mittens and Braille. Pubs don’t do food; they offer internal mops and vomit decoration. The idea that the answer to a lack of reasonably priced decent public food in suburban Britain, and the declining fortunes of public houses, is the gastropub is a Tony-ish mule of an idea.
Pub kitchens are invariably tiny and ill equipped to produce much more than a toasted sandwich. The dreams and desires of drinkers and eaters aren’t complementary. A drinker needs room to get clumsy, flick fag ends and do Sean Connery impressions, which tends to get in the way of the organic English spotted loin in mustard and balsamic jus. And what about fighting? You can’t have a fight in a gastropub. It would be all Hooray Billy Bunter bun-chucking.
We’ve had a decade of pub restaurants, and they’re virtually all horribly splod and tish. But still they come, little upstairs rooms with a couple of tables, a snug made into a kitchen, barmen doubling as waiters. So it was with less than vaunting enthusiasm that I shuffled down to The Cut, in Lambeth, to try the Anchor & Hope. I couldn’t even get the Blonde to come. She said she’d see me for real dinner later.
I walked in and discovered it was a pub: a very pubby pub, pubbled with after-work drinkers. The restaurant bit is in an adjoining room. At 6.30pm, it was packed — and I was amazed. The waitress found me a spot on a table with two couples. The kitchen is a cage the size of a Monopoly board, with a pair of cooks running around like the top hat and the iron. I imagine this crowd were all pre-theatre folk going to the Old and Young Vics, but they didn’t look Saga enough, and none of them seemed interested in moving. The menu is to the point and very good — modern, non-dainty-Rhodes English. It has that distinctive, meaty smell of Fergus Henderson. I think maybe both the hat and the iron trained with him at St John.
I started with a dish that made the whole room go quiet. The lights went down and a single spot illuminated the bowl in front of me. In the distance, there was a choir singing the Angelus, and I knew, the way you just know, that I was going to love this dish with all my heart for the rest of my life — or its life, whichever was longer. It was a heart-clutchingly thick potato soup, and nestling in it was a slab, a plinth, an altar of pressed foie gras, gently melting. It was properly brilliant. Every descriptive illustration I can think of to make it live for you is so intimately sensual that we can’t print it on a Sunday. It was rough’n’toff, and it cost £7.80 — the best value in the whole world ever. After that, I had a smoked herring on lentils, which was worthy and tasty, with plenty of hard-boiled egg and potato.
I would like to have tried the rack of lamb with anchovies, the slow-cooked stuffed duck or the cassoulet, but they’re only available for twos or fours, and, though I begged, there was none to spare. So, my complaint is that too much of the menu demands you have a friend. Surely the lonely deserve cassoulet more than the popular?
For pudding, I had rhubarb, cream and shortbread. This is the very best time for forced rhubarb. Nothing had been done to it, except poaching with sugar and adding a dollop of marvellously thick cream. The shortbread, though, was really nasty: organic-health-shop good for you. After a couple of mouthfuls, the iron, or perhaps the top hat, trotted over. “I’m awfully sorry,” he said. “I think you’ve been given oatcakes.”
The Anchor & Hope looks like a crap pub. It’s a brilliant restaurant. It’s what you’ve been waiting for.
This week's star rating guide:
Hope & glory
Great white hope
Here’s hoping
Hope against hope
Not a hope
