Fay Maschler reviews The Brackenbury

The Brackenbury is back with its virtue of being the ideal neighbourhood restaurant intact, says Fay Maschler
Fay Maschler15 May 2015

Chef Rowley Leigh and Nick Smallwood, two of the chaps who founded Kensington Place in 1987, are at the next table. Up a short flight of stairs sits Tom Oldroyd, chef-director of Polpo Ltd, with Adam Hyman, author of The Code Bulletin, “eyes and ears of the (catering) industry”. Lauded as the ideal neighbourhood restaurant when Adam and Katie Robinson opened it in 1991, The Brackenbury has eerily been reconstituted with that virtue intact, right down to the detail of supplying friends and acquaintances with whom to chew the fat in the extended gaps — it is very early days — between courses.

The premises — after a hiatus as a Filipino restaurant that didn’t sit easily in what estate agents in their wisdom once christened Brackenbury Village — are now in the ownership of Ossie Gray, formerly manager and wine and olive oil buyer at The River Café, and chefs Humphrey Fletcher and Andy Morris, who between them can drop the names of Kensington Place, Glasshouse, River Café, Anglesea Arms and Providores. It is a team to conjure with and a special grace to watch the first son of the late Rose Gray peering quizzically at customers, making sure they are content.

Our choice at dinner to start is Tamworth pork terrine with prunes, a sturdy slice with the fruit at the heart packing the sort of punch that the word pâté doesn’t come near, served with celeriac remoulade and toasted sourdough and tagliatelle alla cacciatore where the hunter’s bag of pheasant, rabbit and wood pigeon have gone into the ragu. If Elizabeth David walked in (unlikely as she is no longer with us), I dare say you could have knocked her down with a feather.

Guess the main dish that Reg opts for? Steak, 28 days aged Aberdeen Angus bavette, cut into rosy pink slices with frites (sic), watercress and Béarnaise. It holds no surprises but that is good. Boldly roasted halved endive is the most compelling part of pork cheek braised in Pedro Ximenez accompanied by mashed potato but it was too burly a choice to follow sensibly the game ragu.

Chat with Rowley Leigh, these days chef-patron of Le Café Anglais in Bayswater (also opening soon probably not near you in Hong Kong), as we wait for iced Paris-Brest with hot chocolate sauce and prunes in Armagnac with crème fraîche, reveals that he and Nick Smallwood owned The Brackenbury for a while after the Robinsons took off for South Africa. “Their marriage split up and he’s become a baker,” says Rowley, adding Eeyorishly: “They nearly all do.”

I go back to The Brackenbury for Sunday lunch and find someone eating there whom I knew a thousand years ago when I worked as a copywriter at J Walter Thompson. “Do you remember the exercise classes we used to go to?” she says. I don’t. I never remember exercise classes.

The menu has changed quite a lot between Tuesday and Sunday but is not, as I imagined it would be, a list with roasts as the centrepiece. The nearest we come to that is slow-roast pork shoulder with gilded butternut squash and braised cavalo nero standing in for the mandatory kale. A spicy fish stew of bream, cuttlefish and mussels in a tomato base with a slice of bruschetta just maintaining a crunch in the stock and welcoming the slick of aioli is an ace plateful. The classic garnish of Montpellier butter made with bitter leaves, herbs, anchovies, gherkins and capers melts most helpfully over a brace of grilled quail.

Yorkshire ginger pudding, a preternaturally light sponge of dark hue, is much enjoyed and pretty in pink rhubarb, which comes with custard, is praised for its acerbic quality — perfect January food.

If the clientele don’t all know one another they look as if they might or should and they blend seamlessly into the understated surroundings. A baby makes his presence felt but with no more volume than the burble from a baby alarm. There is no music, which we consider a blessing. Adam Hyman emails me to say what a pleasure it was to go to a restaurant that wasn’t trying to be the coolest this or the trendiest that. No, it is just The Brackenbury, back safe and sound.

129-131 Brackenbury Road, W6 (020 8741 4928, brackenburyrestaurant.co.uk). Lunch noon-3pm Fri, Sat & Sun. Dinner 6.30-10pm Tues-Sat. A meal for two with wine about £94 including 12.5 per cent service.

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