table talk: brunswick house, vauxhall, london · 2017-6-25 table talk: brunswick house, vauxhall,...

2017-6-25 Table Talk: Brunswick House, Vauxhall, London | The Sunday Times Magazine | The Times & The Sunday Times

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Table Talk: Brunswick House, Vauxhall,LondonAtmosphere Food

AA Gill

March 13 2016, 12:01am, The Sunday Times

BENJAMIN MCMAHON

I have a bit of a thing for markets. Most people, when they visita new city, want to see the sights — churches, palaces,boulevards, museums — but before restaurants and ca�s, I wantto peruse fruit and veg, panting hens in cages, the gallows offlayed ungulates, old wood, sticky and glittering with fish gutsand scales, cramped alleys of bagged rice and hanging flitches,

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banks of flours, buckets of frogs and miniature landscapes of

spices.

The Blonde likes markets, too, so we spend happy hours

strolling the trestles of consumption. The beauty and pleasure

of a market is all in the form, made by its function. Its aesthetic

is purely a by-product of its purpose, the commercial zeal to

feed a city. Markets are the truest evocation of the places they

serve, and the measure of a good one is not in the variety,

freshness or desirability of its provisions, it’s in its customers:

who is shopping and what are they buying?

Consequently, I’m wary of the artisanal markets in London that

grow like mushrooms between the railway arches, in car parks

and bits of green that are too small for ball games. Don’t look at

the beaming purveyors of added values, those addicted to

smoking garlic, butter and salt with new takes on hot and sweet,

proprietary unctions, or the keepers of goats and all their curdy

lactations, or the herders of urban bees and garden-shed

sourdough kneaders. Look at who is buying. How many

customers are carrying shopping bags, not rucksacks or nappy

bags. How many are really shopping with a predestined purpose

and a list? None of them.

London markets are for leisure — serendipitous consumption

without appetite for people who don’t like consumerism. It’s

play- acting with food, an extension of untested cookbooks

promoting happy selfishness through happy shopping and

happy ingredients. I went to one in Maltby Street, south of the

river, on a Saturday, under the inevitable railway arches, giving

it a suitable Victorian alley for foraged cafes and single-

obsessive stores selling wa�es, tacos and 13 varieties of scotch

egg. But mostly what they’re selling is passion: a passion for

moon-churned butter, smiley co�ee, miniature-pig sausages

and Huddersfield piri-piri.

“Passion” is a word that has migrated from


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“the lust of your groin to the patting of yourtummy

“Passion” is a word that has migrated from the lust of yourgroin to the patting of your tummy. Modern folk queue for awhi� and a peep at someone else’s passion. These are purveyorsof food porn; this is food dogging. We stand and manoeuvremorsels of amateur peasant passion into our mouths.

But the really surprising thing was how bad it all was: the crassBake O� mess, the production and preparation so unsure. Salt-beef pastrami that had all the chutzpah of the Lower East Side,but none of the Harry Met Sally-moaning, soggy pleasure. Therewere sandwiches that tasted like meaty ashtrays; student-digdoughnuts that were like congealing bog paper with sweet,pustular injections of yellow-sugared lard.

And everything is expensive. The point of markets is supposedto be their cheapness — they have no overheads — and theirvolume. I bought a slab of passionate butter, just because Iwanted to see what £4.50 of churned milk tastes like. Well, ittastes salty. Last Tango in Bermondsey salty.

Brunswick House isn’t in Maltby Street, it’s in Vauxhall. But it isin an architectural-salvage-junky antiques shop that alsohappens to have an outlet in Maltby Street, where they sell thedecoration and furniture of my childhood, with an added patinaof irony and two noughts. Brunswick House is a mismatchedcafe with a bar, where you can eat uncomfortably o� old schoolOur site uses cookies. By continuing to use our site you are agreeing to our cookies policy.

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desks, church pews and tables from 1950s canteens — all those

extinct institutions designed for attention-grabbing discomfort.

It is run by Jackson Boxer, and while I don’t think people should

be saddled with the sins of their fathers, they can bask in the

warmth of their grandmothers, which in this case is Arabella

Boxer, a marvellous food writer. The menu is an insouciant

challenge of outré varieties of familiar ingredients: scru�-of-

the-neck remaking of English home cooking, in the mode of

Fergus Henderson at St John — now the orthodox trencher of

our indigenous cuisine.

Brunswick starts serving breakfast at 9.30am, long after anyone

with a job has broken their fast, but about the time that the

louche, relaxed, young and self-employed consider live yoghurt,

granola and a baked apple. The Blonde and I went for lunch

with the twins and ordered everything on the short menu. I

liked the carrot, harissa and chickpea fritters and the mullet

crudo, raf tomatoes, buttermilk and sea purslane. It sounds like

the first line of a John Masefield poem.

The pork terrine with red cabbage was as disappointing as pork

terrines invariably are: a naked pork pie. But cannellini beans

with poached egg and crab butter was whisperingly better. The

crab butter wasn’t as fiercely nippy as it might have been, more

Last Tango in Lowestoft. Best of all was the saddleback neck

fillet with smoked cod roe and calçots, which are Spanish spring

onions.

There were good juices and the service was as charming and

helpful as anywhere I’ve been recently. The food comes with a

homemade, get-this-down-you hospitality and an undecorated

confidence. It’s made with careful, slightly nerdily curated

ingredients, but the sense of balance, taste and gastronomy are

more than sound, occasionally jauntily inspired.


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Restaurants set in businesses that have other fish to fry often

su�er from being treated as canteens, or adverts for the more

important business of shopping. And this has been the case on

this site in the past. But Brunswick House has turned that on its

head — the salvage now looks like a warehouse of restaurant

furniture.

The V&A used to advertise itself with knowing irony as “an ace

ca� with quite a nice museum attached”. But there is no irony

here. The overwhelming reason for coming to this address is

now the food, and the rest of it you can peruse with the

vicarious pleasure of knowing that you’re not going to have to

dust any of it.

Brunswick House

30 Wandsworth Road, London SW8 2LG; 020 7720 2926,

brunswickhouse.co; Mon-Fri: 9.30am-midnight; Sat: 10am-

midnight; Sun: 10am-5pm

From the menu

Starters

Carrot, harissa and chickpea fritter £6.40

Mullet crudo, raf tomatoes, buttermilk and sea purslane £8

Mains

Cannellini beans with poached egg and crab butter £10

Saddleback neck fillet with smoked cod roe and calçots £13.80

Desserts

Banana and rum brioche £5.80

Rhubarb, mascarpone and fennel £5.80

Total

For two, including 12.5% service £56

Three of the best: restaurants in antiques shops


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Christian’s, Harrogate Crimple Hall is a showroom for antiques and vintage furniture.Its bistro, Christian’s, serves wood-fired pizzas and seasonalYorkshire produce. Leeds Road, Pannal, Harrogate, North Yorkshire HG3 1EW;01423 870800, christianscafe.co.uk

The Swan at Tetsworth, Oxford Within a grade II listed Elizabethan coaching inn, the Swan sellswares from more than 80 dealers and serves modern Frenchfood. 5 Upper High Street, Tetsworth, Oxford OX9 7AB; 01844 281182,restaurant.theswan.co.uk

Edenshine, North Wales Browse Afonwen Antiques Centre, then eat at the family-runEdenshine restaurant, with views over the Welsh countryside. Near Caerwys, Mold, Flintshire CH7 5UB; 01352 720797,afonwen.co.uk/restaurant

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table talk: brunswick house, vauxhall, london · 2017-6-25 table talk: brunswick house, vauxhall,...

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