So is the food. St John’s menu changes daily, but its style is constant—what Fergus Henderson, its co-founder, calls “a kind of British cooking”. It became famous in the early noughties, when the late Anthony Bourdain, an American chef, author and television presenter, rhapsodised over its roast bone marrow salad. That is the only dish that almost never leaves the menu, for good reason: it is a symphony of unctuousness , brightness , salinity and crunch , which the diner composes himself.
The offal fad competed with one for molecular gastronomy, with its spheres of olive juice, then gave way to farm-to-table cooking, which painstakingly detailed the provenance of every radish in a salad. Eventually came the narrative-driven cooking of today, in which each dish has its culturally appropriate origin story. The marrow is still on the menu at St John.
Yet while the offal grabs the headlines, Mr Henderson’s kind of British cooking ultimately rests on bold, unfussy simplicity. It is a cold-weather translation of Italian country cooking, with high-quality meat and vegetables simply prepared. The menu is laconic , flavours strong and balanced, presentation a flourish above plain. Mr Henderson now has Parkinson’s disease and no longer cooks, but the restaurant hews to his vision.
In a mercurial industry, that is rare. Far too many posh metropolitan restaurants share a dreary, trendy predictability, supplying the same gently upbeat music, the same mixture of vaguely Italianate and East Asian dishes, and excessively busy cocktails with poetic or suggestive names. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Everyone wants to succeed, and these things sell. Castigating restaurateurs for offering them is as silly as berating directors for making superhero films.
Not every singular vision succeeds, or is worth pursuing in the first place. Stubbornness and greatness are not the same thing. But—as every would-be novelist turned lawyer or sculptor turned dentist knows—such dreams are all too easy to abandon out of fear of failure. And more than most businesses, restaurants tend to fail. To open one that goes against the grain is a risk.
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