Goldies London, 10 Kingly Court, Carnaby Street, London W1B 5PW. Small plates £4.50-£11, big plates £14-£22, dessert £7, wines from £29
Here is a profound, if grossly oversimplified observation: the more rudimentary a restaurant’s cooking process becomes, the bigger the bill. At its pinnacle you get to the plutocrat excesses of the high-end sushi counter where no cooking may be involved at all, but prices can be scorching deep, smoking holes in any hopes you had for your family’s future. It doesn’t take massive insight to understand why this might be. If you are doing very little to an ingredient, it has to be the best possible, because there is nowhere to hide. The raw bar is the cult of produce, complete with its own acutely delineated rituals. Admire the pearlescence of the scallop; swoon over the marbling of the tuna belly.
The same often applies to the next stage down in simplicity: the live fire grill. If all you are bringing to bear is a lick of flame or a whisper of smoke, then the things being given the treatment must be impeccable: a perfectly aged slab of retired Spanish dairy cow, with a thick, nicotine-yellow ribbon of fat at its back, or a glistening turbot the size of a 1990s domestic satellite dish. When I think of the cult of the live fire grill, I think of Tomos Parry’s restaurants Brat and Mountain, of Lita in Marylebone and the recently opened Basque grill Ibai. I’ve already eaten at the first three of these and each time quickly become a slathering devotee of the cult. The carefully managed indirect heat of the live fire grill really does all the right things to a whole fish. Each time, I’ve blanched at the bill, paid it, told myself it was worth it.
This is a classic case of culinary action and reaction. Led by Heston Blumenthal’s advances at the Fat Duck, the early noughties were all about luxe restaurant ultra-high processing: sauces foamed or spherified courtesy of a few toys from the food science lab; tranches of fish seasoned, bagged up and cooked under pressure; sponge mixes aerated, then microwaved to create lacy matrices. It was complex and skilled stuff, which took the ingredient as mere starting point. (A lot of this intense processing still goes on in ambitious tasting menu-based restaurants; they just don’t talk about it so much). But, eventually, something was bound to rise up in opposition. And so it came to pass that any kitchen worth its pink Himalayan salt fitted a microgauged live fire grill, bought good things to cook on it and then charged the earth for doing so.
Which is why we should celebrate the arrival of Goldies, a new live-fire restaurant from the Normandy-born team behind the French bistro Blanchette. Goldies does not charge a premium for doing mostly simple things to your food. It is located in a sweet, peach-coloured space in Kingly Court, a fancy restaurant village just behind London’s Carnaby Street, where the open-walled dining rooms expand out into a chatter-frosted central courtyard. According to Yannis and Maxime Alary, the brothers responsible, they wanted a restaurant that did grills and frites, the latter being the goldies of the name. Hence no apostrophe, because it’s a plural rather than a name. Accordingly, the grill menu includes a slab of aged sirloin for £22 and half a spiced and blackened chicken with smoked yoghurt for a reasonable £15.
But there are lots of other things to be cheered by. Curling batons of corn cob come singed and spice-pelted, and thickly brushed with a green speckled parsley butter that pools beneath. Fat prawns complete with their heads are skewered with hunks of taut-skinned chorizo and grilled until smoky, so that their various bodily juices combine. There are chunks of beef short-rib, tender enough to be carved with a spoon, but with a crisp char from that grill, alongside a fat whorl of a smoked onion mayo. It’s as if some of the smouldering wood has come along for the ride. There’s also a rustic hunk of Normandy in the shape of a rugged ground-pork sausage filled with boudin noir. It’s grilled and generously slathered in a sticky, sweet-sour apple cider sauce. This is flame and smoke used less to prove authentic caveman credentials and more just because it makes things taste nice. The only dud is leeks vinaigrette, the allium cut into cylinders, skewered and grilled before being dressed. The leeks are simply undercooked. They need to be properly boiled before going over the embers.
As the pork dish arrives, I suggest to our friendly waiter that what might go really well with all this is some chips. This is light sarcasm. We had ordered both the beef dripping and the vegetable oil version, which come with multiple sauces. Regard their late arrival either as a teething issue, or an opportunity to focus on them. They are crisp and salty and indeed golden. While I admire the decision to offer them fried in both animal and non-animal fats, it seems like a lot of trouble for not a vast advantage. Sure, the beef dripping frites do have the ripe, rendered tang of a Yorkshire chippie, but I wouldn’t have missed its absence. The mayonnaise-adjacent sauces have names like Samurai, Andalusia and Brazil BBQ and varying hits of spice, sweetness and smoke. My favourite is the pepper sauce, a thick, wobbly version of the steak classic. That deep-fat fryer is also put to good work on courgette flowers stuffed with salty, crumbly ricotta, and chewy tangles of baby squid with a rough-cut sauce tartare. Do get a big bowlful of their sharp, green salad.
While Goldies might be a place you would like to visit, it is not claiming to be a destination. It’s not some culinary station of the cross where smoke billows and every one genuflects at that aged slab of cow. It’s more louche than that, more elbows on the table and can I nick a chip please? The short wine list has a lot of options available by both glass and 500ml carafe. Whatever volume you order, you will find it is mostly “natural”, possibly cloudy and so on. Let’s assume that’s part of the Northern French rustic charm. There is just one dessert, but they’ve put their back into it: a well-made choux bun, filled with vanilla soft serve, then drenched in hot chocolate sauce and showered with crushed nuts. So that’s grills, chips, dips and something messy made with chocolate all at a reasonable price. As propositions go it’s not a bad one, is it?
News bites
The Edinburgh-born sommelier James Clarke, who has worked across the city, including at the Palmerston and Divino Enoteca, will open his own place next month in the city’s Stockbridge. Sotto will have a downstairs Trattoria, overseen by chef Francesco Ascrizzi. It will seat 36 and serve a changing menu of classic seasonal Italian dishes. Upstairs will be the wine bar, with a significant number of the 200-plus wines available by the glass, as well as a selection of bottles to buy retail. It opens 4 October (sottoedinburgh.com).
And on the subject of Italian food, Calabrian-born chef Francesco Mazzei, who departed D&D London’s Sartoria last year, has announced his new home. He is going to London’s Corinthia Hotel, where he will take over the space which is now the Northall brasserie. Mazzei, who describes his style as “mamma’s cooking with chef’s hands”, currently has a restaurant at the Corinthia’s sister hotel on the island of Malta. The new restaurant will open next summer.
Tommy Banks of Roots in York and the Black Swan at Oldstead is to join forces with Adam Maddock, former head chef of the Fife Arms in Braemer, to oversee a mammoth food and drink offering at Saltmoore, a self-described “wellness resort” in North Yorkshire. There will be four restaurants, including a “wellness” café serving salads, smoothies and “bone broth”, otherwise known as stock. There will also be a brasserie, a pizzeria and a formal dining room called Calluna. The hotel will open later in the autumn (saltmoore.co.uk)
Jay Rayner’s cookbook, Nights Out at Home: Recipes and Stories from 25 Years as a Restaurant Critic (Penguin, £22), is available from guardianbookshop.com at £18.70
Email Jay at [email protected] or follow him on X @jayrayner1