Café Monico: Rowley Leigh joins forces with Soho House to create Italo-French beau ideal

Rowley Leigh has created a menu with wide appeal but also a dash of daring at this all-day brasserie, says Fay Maschler
Drink it in: the bar area at Café Monico
Matt Writtle
Fay Maschler1 February 2018

In his recently published book 1971: Never a Dull Moment: Rock’s Golden Year, David Hepworth — born 1950, a former presenter of The Old Grey Whistle Test, Live Aid heavy-hitter and editor of Smash Hits magazine — claims that year as the annus mirabilis for rock and pop music.

On Twitter, someone swallowing this premise — not apparently realising that we will all pin that moment on when we are, or were, approaching 21 — asks if there is a restaurant equivalent. Quick as a flash, I reply, “Yes. 1987, the year Marco Pierre White’s Harveys, Simon Hopkinson’s Bibendum, Ruth Rogers’s and Rose Gray’s River Café and Rowley Leigh’s Kensington Place all opened.”

I can defend this stance even more powerfully and convincingly than my claim that 1963 (when I was 18) when Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (yes!), Big Girls Don’t Cry by the Four Seasons, Please Please Me by The Beatles, Ring of Fire by Johnny Cash and Little Deuce Coupe by The Beach Boys were all released is the obvious music watershed.

Rowley Leigh is the figure that concerns us here. A man I admire and shyly love, who also came of age in 1971, is collaborating with Soho House in the creation of Café Monico in Shaftesbury Avenue, not far from the original restaurant of that name on Piccadilly Circus owned by Giacamo and Battista Monico.

Wide appeal: Chicken confit, sausage and haricots (Matt Writtle)

For Leigh cooking has been redemption of sorts. Erudite, a political activist, anarchic, resistant to authority — character traits not entirely subsumed — in 1977 when he was turfed off the dole, he saw an ad in the Evening Standard for a job as grill chef at Joe Allen: “I was dropped in way beyond my depth and I swam.”

Needing to understand greater depths in cooking led to working for Albert Roux for eight years at Le Gavroche and Le Poulbot. Afterwards, wanting to democratise the actitivity of eating out — and get a slice of the fun he saw his chum Alastair Little enjoying as chef of 192 Kensington Park Road — he opened Kensington Place with partners Nick Smallwood and Simon Slater. It changed perceptions, not least by revealing the whole drama through a total glass frontage, thus inviting everyone in.

The all-day brasserie menu at Café Monico is a beau ideal of an Italo-French list, with wide appeal, luxury as birthright, enough reassurance but also a dash of daring. In the three meals I try during the first week of trading some parts work better than others, but writing a menu is one talent, training a brigade a longer process.

A link between the original Monico and the Soho House tribute: waiting staff in classical brasserie outfits
Matt Writtle

Under the heading Starters is one of Rowley’s signature dishes, Parmesan custard with anchovy toast. You can watch him cooking it on YouTube, where the custard is creamier, but here the savoury sandwich bearing the firm imprint of a Breville toaster is a new touch. A simple salad of bibb, aka butterhead, lettuce (agreeably floppy leaves) with radishes is stylishly assembled and dressed. Another salad of tuna with white beans and red onions takes me back to giving dinner parties in the 1970s, when it was thought quite the thing. It can still hold its head high.

Tuesday’s Plat du Jour (served after 7pm and Sundays) of fish pie cowers under too heavy a covering of whorled mashed potato. Coming to the rescue are tomatoes with cream, the idea that Elizabeth David championed from the book Cooking in Ten Minutes written by French-Polish scientist Edouard de Pomiane. Tomato halves are sautéed in butter before being cloaked in bubbling cream. A whiff of nutmeg is exactly the dab behind the ears that they need.

One of my pals writing to thank for dinner praises the menu for refusing to “acknowledge any of the vagaries of fashion, nothing scorched or played around with, very classical, soothing flavours”. He starts his meal with fettuccine with nettles and pecorino (much admired) and moves on to guinea fowl with morels, which is, with a caramel cashmere-coloured sauce, precisely what arrived on the plate, no extraneous garnish.

Desserts are tempting and triumphant. Crêpe soufflé Grand Marnier is not Suzette but her more knowing friend. We get a kick out of intrepidly spiced pineapple topped with vanilla ice cream plus batons of pain perdu (eggy bread) in custard and the Coupe Pavlova with meringue, crème Chantilly, strawberry sauce and passion fruit could have been created deliberately to exemplify indulgence.

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Sited between Les Misérables (Queen’s Theatre) and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Gielgud Theatre) in a building also owned by Cameron Mackintosh, Café Monico has a clear evening purpose. Daytime, looking out on Shaftesbury Avenue from the first floor (bookable), also has its charms enhanced by the flexibility of, say, an omelette at £6 or a T-bone steak at £34.

Waiting staff in classical brasserie outfits bring more sharply into focus a link between the original Monico and the Soho House tribute. Indeed, the women in black dresses with little white pinnies, their hair in high swishing ponytails, could effectively furnish a Victorian fantasy about the appeal of dressage.

Open Mon-Fri 8am-midnight (1am Fri), Sat-Sun 9am-1am (midnight Sun). Set-price menu, noon-7pm £15/£20 for two/three courses. A la carte, a meal for two with wine, about £110 including 12.5 per cent service.

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