August Wine and Food report from London-Closure of Le Gavroche
Posted and written by *Giles MacDonough in London
*MacDonogh has worked as a journalist, most notably for the Financial Times (1988–2003), where he covered food, drink and a variety of other subjects. He has also contributed to most of the other important British newspapers, and is a regular contributor to The Times. As an historian, MacDonogh concentrates on central Europe, principally Germany.He was educated at the City of London School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he read modern history. He later carried out historical research at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris.MacDonogh is the author of fourteen books, chiefly about German history; he has also written about gastronomy and wine. In 1988 he won a Glenfiddich Special Award[for his first book, A Palate in Revolution (Robin Clark) and was shortlisted for the André Simon Award.His books have been translated into French, Italian, Bulgarian, German, Chinese, Slovakian, Spanish, Russian and Polish.
Two announcements were made in August concerning the fate of much-loved London restaurants: both Le Gavroche and the India Club were to close, the India Cluin mid-September and Le Gavroche in January 2024. They are very different places, one just about the most luxurious non-hotel dining room in London and offering a hugmenu, and the other doing a passable imitation of an old-fashioned eating place in downtown Calcutta and listing a handful of basic curries and m biryanis.
There was a time (dear to me then) when I ate often at the Gavroche. It was towards the end of Albert’s stewardship, and the beginning of his son, young Michel’s. Meals were generally in that plush basement, or if wine-related, in the private dining rooms upstairs.
When it wasn’t a private function, you came in at ground level to be greeted by Silvano, and there was usually a glass of champagne and some amuse-gueules while you studied the menu. When your table was ready to went downstairs and spoke to the sommelier. For much of that time I think it was the very able Thierry Tomasin. It was(probably still is) a quite fabulous wine list, and there was London’s best cheese board to consider too.
When Michel introduced a cheapish lunchtime menu, you had access to both, and there was half a bottle a head of wine included in the fixed price menu as well.
I was too young to know Le Gavroche when Albert and his brother, the older Michel, opened it in Lower Sloane Street in 1967, although I dreamed of going there throughout my teens. The move to Mayfair in 1981 was all part of a calculation that it might gain the three-stars that are the badge of glory for any French restaurant.
This happened the following year. As such the new Gavroche looked more like a hotel dining-room than the then fashionable ‘bistro’. When Marco-Pierre White left Harvey’s in Wandsworth 1995 for the old Hyde Park Hotel it was for the same reason, and had the same result:gaining three stars meant a certain sort of dining experience, and a very high ratio of chefs to tables. At Harvey’s Marco had eleven chefs in a space not much bigger than my kitchen. It was very hot and tempers frayed.
Albert and his brother Michel were obviously not the first people to offer a certain style of French cooking in London. Escoffier cooked at the Savoy and Carlton Hotels for thirty years, running kitchens with enormous brigades of chefs. When he left in 1920 there were French restaurants in Soho and the West End, but with the economic crisis in the twenties and thirties and the war, grand French cooking was increasingly restricted to hotels until London’s gastronomic scene began the slow process of emancipation in the sixties and seventies.
In that process, the Roux brothers and Michel Bourdin at the Connaught played the key roles. Not only did they purvey refined takes on the classic canon, they ran kitchens large enough to train proper chefs. At first, they would have been mostly French, but with time they were joined by natives like Marco and Gordon Ramsay.
When young Michel announced his intention to close the Gavroche last month, he gave his excuse as wanting to pursue new options given that his lease was coming up for renewal. In a number of recent interviews, however, he had made it pikestaff plain that Brexit had put a spanner in the works. In 2021 he had had to close at lunchtime for want of chefs, and bringing in properly trained ones from France required footing out £5,000 for each and every one of them to the greedy state, and he needed fifteen. He is not alone in being open evenings only. Even very modest restaurants are closed for lunch as no one can find trained staff. And then there was the increasingly dire quality of ingredients, and soaring prices for imported goods.
I shall miss the Gavroche a lot. I cherish a particular memory of a lunch there when Silvano dropped by during dessert to ask me what I was going to do with the rest of my day. I replied that I was going to Oxford for a high-table dinner. He commiserated with me, and as I sipped my coffee, he arrived at the table bearing a glass of 1927 armagnac to fortify me for the evening. I had to run to catch my train but once I had settled in, I fell into blissful sleep, waking at the precise moment when we pulled into Oxford station. Not even the ticket inspector had been able to rouse me.
The India Club was a rather basic Indian restaurant two flights up in the Strand Place Hotel next to King’sCollege London; a friendly place where you could bring your own wine, in an arts and crafts building of 1911.
For sixty of seventy years it had been a meeting place for Indian politicians in Britain and for the rest of us a useful place for a meal, pre-or-post-theatre or cinema. I shall miss it too as this and other little bits of traditional London life are sacrificed to the exaggerated appetites of government pampered developers.
Life goes on, for all that. At the beginning of August, I travelled out to Hoxton to the lovely Lily Vanilli’s bakery off the Columbia Road to ice a Christmas cake. I got lost and arrived last to find two rounds of carrot and beetroot cake steeped in Scottish Caorunn gin which I was to decorate to professional standards. Caorunn is the stablemate of Balmenach malt whisky and its ‘London dry’ uses local botanicals in the form of rowan berries, heather, coul blush apples, dandelions and bog myrtle. There was plenty of gin on hand to provide morale. I soon got into the swing of things, spinning my cake on a sort of potters’ wheel and coating it with a thick layer of butter scream. The next stage was a bit harder. First, I had to learn to apply the piping, squeezing with one hand and turning with the other. This was followed by leaves and flowers, dotted here and there with a smaller piping bag. I think I began to get into my stride at this point.
There were naturally a great many oohs and aahs when I got the cake home, the gin in the body of the cake was appreciated, but some felt there should have been a bit of the spirit in the icing too. To’ak chocolate claims to be the most expensive in the world.
It uses extremely rare Nacional cacao beans from the valley of the Piedra de Plata in the Equatorian rain forest to make attractively presented 56-grams bars that combine 65% pure cacao with 35% cane sugar, enhanced by various flavourings from Equator’s mountains and seas. I tried a crunchy Caramelized Pop Amaranth, Andean Mints Tipo, Galapagos Orange and Salt and Malva Flowers.
What they have in common is a rich, buttery taste and considerable wine-like persistence. Andean Mints is wonderfully mouth filling, but my favourites were probably the Galapagos Orange, which uses rare salt from the islands and preserved orange peel, and the Malva Flowers (reputedly aphrodisiac) which seems to go on and on for ever, and has a taste slightly
reminiscent of lychees.
I have not neglected wine. Alerted by a friend that 1994 Châteauneuf-du-papes might have turned up their toes I located some Vieux Télégraphe and thought I had better try it. Keeping my fingers firmly crossed I was pleased to extract a healthy-looking cork.
The wine caused me no heartache either: there was lots of morello cherry and blackberry on the nose and lashings of liquorice and black pepper on the palate. It has a fine, shuddering length.
And I am pleased to say it wasn’t the last bottle either. The same vintage from the equally Grenache- dominated Domaine Versino (Jean et Jean-Paul), was less complex, but there was power still and plenty ofliquorice and black pepper.
If you still have any 1994s, don’t give up on them yet!
