I tire easily of this wretched stereotype for obvious reasons: I am British, I love British cooking and so on. However, what frustrates me most about this is that people seem to be basing it on no experiences of their own. Or very bad, uncharacteristic experiences.
That having been said, there is a hell of a lot of rubbish being dished up in Britain masquerading as "good old-fashioned home cooking". Pubs are guiltier than most of this. Many people seem to think a Sunday roast in a pub is celebratory good eating or representative of what British food is good for. This is rarely the case but it does sum up nicely what the matter with our nation is: not always the food, but the people in it.
To many of us, food is becoming a chore that we need to complete a couple of times a day. The rest of us are busy splashing money around like there's no tomorrow on the most expensive, exclusive restaurants around or writing blogs because we can't actually afford to do so. Too much food in Britain is an imitation of what we think people want to eat. I'm guilty of this too in as much as I love French and Italian food, and you only need to look at this year's Michelin Guide ratings handed out to London's restaurants to see what's popular with the culinary illuminati.
The main problem, as I say, lies with us in that we either heat up ready meals, eat in foreign restaurants or follow recipes meticulously. Dependence on, and pride in, the food of our land is not part of our national psyche. There's definitely something wrong with British eating, but it's not the food's fault. And I'll still defend it in arguments with people who say "but British food's terrible, right?"
Given that we did have a friend staying with us from overseas for the Christmas period, and that she has an open mind, we opted for something staunchly traditional and ever-so-English as our big meal out whilst she was with us. Rules seemed appropriate, given that it's the oldest restaurant in London and it celebrates that much-maligned cuisine of ours.
Rules is absolutely a London institution: proud, obstinate and far more for tourists than locals. There's not much wrong with it but it doesn't stir the same home-fire passions in me that St. John managed to a few months earlier. For starters, it is pretty tacky. That did have something to do with the fact that we were going there between Christmas and new year, but the setup is very much geared towards showing off ye olde England, as opposed to just England.
Another thing which stuck in my craw was the size of the menu. There is such a wealth of choice going around that you spend twenty minutes navigating the card before selecting from it. There is no need for menus this large unless you are either a multi-cuisine restaurant (terrible), trying to please everyone (a mistake) or just showing off the size of the kitchen (unnecessary). After such time had passed that we were warned dinner might be off if we waited much longer (admittedly we'd made a late booking - it was after midnight at this point), we selected and braced ourselves.
We had three salads to start: two seafood and one meat. The lobster & avocado and the Portland crab with wild herbs were relatively pleasant without much to say for themselves. The lobster was fresh but slightly overwhelmed by what I can only assume was the English equivalent of thousand island sauce (left). Too much of it for sure but lobster itself carried the dish through. Similarly, the crab was actually good but all you really got from the meat was celery which had been used to make up the base for the crab (right). In terms of the sauce, this one was spot on, but I couldn't quite get past the celery.
The ham hock salad, combining split pea dressing, quails eggs and chickweed with the ham, was slightly better (left). The flavours acted more coherently as a combination, with the peas refreshing the strong, meaty ham and the eggs adding a touch of rustic softness to the dish. My complaint was that the proportions were off, which left me with too much ham by the end.
Main courses were all about beef. The other half and I went for the house speciality, a rib of roast beef on the bone, with all the trimmings. Our friend went for a steak with Bearnaise and chips. The latter was a monstrous thing, more than an inch thick. It was, however, cooked exceptionally well and there was barely an ounce of fat on it. The sauce was good and the chips were proper. Of course it remained unfinished because it was simply too much food. Maybe that's the message that traditional English cooking sends: more is more.
The rib of beef was more or less a high-class roast dinner (right). This was proper beefeater, bulldog, three lions on the shirt, binge-drinking Englishness. The beef was rare and juicy. The Yorkshire puddings were crisp and light, the potatoes were good if too heavy and the veg was on song. I especially enjoyed the lively and rough horseradish on the side. It was good, to be sure, but at £33 a head for this dish (for two people) I felt it was a little too much for such well-trodden fare.
The one thing I could tell you, after the beef onslaught, was that we had probably picked the wrong choices considering we were eating so late. We were all fairly stuffed and so we sensibly thought twice about ordering dessert. Less sensibly, we ordered two between three and regretted it in many ways. The chocolate pudding and syrup sponge pudding were both heavy, too sweet and the kind of thing you can get on most supermarket shelves. Not terrible or totally unpleasant, just utterly unspectacular and not worth the £15 we paid for them.
That was that. It was after 1am, we had eaten way too much and spent over the odds for food that was indeed eminently British, just not quite as spectacular as we'd hoped. Maybe British food just isn't meant to be spectacular. Perhaps we are just a humble people who eat quietly, pay unquestioningly and move on. Maybe Rules isn't the institution which upholds tradition the way it should. And paying unquestioningly is undoubtedly British. The bill here was over £170 for three people with one glass of wine.
Maybe not: we did enjoy ourselves. Parts of the meal were good. The place is clearly committed to locally-sourced ingredients and serving them as they were meant to be served (even though it's not always perfect). There is enough to be said in favour of the place - almost on principle alone - that means it still belongs in our restaurant catalogue. If you want proper British class, St. John should do the trick. If you want all the trimmings on one of the longest-standing restaurants in the country, this will do you fine.
Rules
Rules is absolutely a London institution: proud, obstinate and far more for tourists than locals. There's not much wrong with it but it doesn't stir the same home-fire passions in me that St. John managed to a few months earlier. For starters, it is pretty tacky. That did have something to do with the fact that we were going there between Christmas and new year, but the setup is very much geared towards showing off ye olde England, as opposed to just England.
Another thing which stuck in my craw was the size of the menu. There is such a wealth of choice going around that you spend twenty minutes navigating the card before selecting from it. There is no need for menus this large unless you are either a multi-cuisine restaurant (terrible), trying to please everyone (a mistake) or just showing off the size of the kitchen (unnecessary). After such time had passed that we were warned dinner might be off if we waited much longer (admittedly we'd made a late booking - it was after midnight at this point), we selected and braced ourselves.
We had three salads to start: two seafood and one meat. The lobster & avocado and the Portland crab with wild herbs were relatively pleasant without much to say for themselves. The lobster was fresh but slightly overwhelmed by what I can only assume was the English equivalent of thousand island sauce (left). Too much of it for sure but lobster itself carried the dish through. Similarly, the crab was actually good but all you really got from the meat was celery which had been used to make up the base for the crab (right). In terms of the sauce, this one was spot on, but I couldn't quite get past the celery.
Main courses were all about beef. The other half and I went for the house speciality, a rib of roast beef on the bone, with all the trimmings. Our friend went for a steak with Bearnaise and chips. The latter was a monstrous thing, more than an inch thick. It was, however, cooked exceptionally well and there was barely an ounce of fat on it. The sauce was good and the chips were proper. Of course it remained unfinished because it was simply too much food. Maybe that's the message that traditional English cooking sends: more is more.
The rib of beef was more or less a high-class roast dinner (right). This was proper beefeater, bulldog, three lions on the shirt, binge-drinking Englishness. The beef was rare and juicy. The Yorkshire puddings were crisp and light, the potatoes were good if too heavy and the veg was on song. I especially enjoyed the lively and rough horseradish on the side. It was good, to be sure, but at £33 a head for this dish (for two people) I felt it was a little too much for such well-trodden fare.The one thing I could tell you, after the beef onslaught, was that we had probably picked the wrong choices considering we were eating so late. We were all fairly stuffed and so we sensibly thought twice about ordering dessert. Less sensibly, we ordered two between three and regretted it in many ways. The chocolate pudding and syrup sponge pudding were both heavy, too sweet and the kind of thing you can get on most supermarket shelves. Not terrible or totally unpleasant, just utterly unspectacular and not worth the £15 we paid for them.
That was that. It was after 1am, we had eaten way too much and spent over the odds for food that was indeed eminently British, just not quite as spectacular as we'd hoped. Maybe British food just isn't meant to be spectacular. Perhaps we are just a humble people who eat quietly, pay unquestioningly and move on. Maybe Rules isn't the institution which upholds tradition the way it should. And paying unquestioningly is undoubtedly British. The bill here was over £170 for three people with one glass of wine.
Maybe not: we did enjoy ourselves. Parts of the meal were good. The place is clearly committed to locally-sourced ingredients and serving them as they were meant to be served (even though it's not always perfect). There is enough to be said in favour of the place - almost on principle alone - that means it still belongs in our restaurant catalogue. If you want proper British class, St. John should do the trick. If you want all the trimmings on one of the longest-standing restaurants in the country, this will do you fine.
Rules
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