Eating Out at a Price: March Food and Wine
As a former restaurant critic, the tragic situation in London causes me no small amount of grief. So many old friends have gone, and so many more are struggling; struggling to find staff, and struggling to put out a menu that is both attractive and attractively priced. Many go in for a limited formula, where the restaurant offers just three hors d’oeuvres, three main courses and a trio of desserts. In the first two categories, at least, there will be one meat, one fish and a veg option, making chicken inevitable. It is not really cheap and, to cap it all, you struggle to find two wines on the list for under £50 a bottle.
Main principles 
Gay Hussar in Greek Street Transformed into the Noble Rot Wine Bar
“One restaurant that disappeared years before the current crisis was the Gay Hussar in Greek Street. The Gay Hussar opened in 1953, long before the name began to raise eyebrows. It closed in 2018, after decades of being the Labour Party’s favourite watering-hole, frequented by the likes of Michael Foot, Denis Healey and the Roys Jenkins and Hattersley. In those days, more MPs wrote books, sometimes quite good books.”
Before his death in 1999, literary Labour MPs presented their new works to Victor Sassie, the half-Swiss, half-Welsh manager who placed the tomes in a famous shelf framing the route to the lavatories at the back of the downstairs dining room. Sassie’s connection with Hungary was tenuous, although he had opened a restaurant called ‘Budapest’ before the Second World War; by the time I started eating there in the eighties, the cooks churning out gallons of goulash and piles of palatschinken were actually Portuguese.
I had almost completely forgotten about the Hussar until the middle of last month when I had a meeting in a newish Greek Street branch of the actually booming Noble Rot wine bar. There was something awfully familiar about the place, and then I noticed the book shelf and the penny dropped: this was the old Hussar! Almost unchanged except that there was no more paprikash or cherry soup. In fact, the food was certainly better than it was in Victor Sassie’s time, but the aura of literary Labour had left, and when I thought about it, literary Labour had died a death too.
Rules, allegedly London’s oldest restaurant, is still there, and very impressive it looks too with its ancient walls groaning under the weight of paintings and prints and its old-style silver service. I used to go there often after 1984, when it was owned by John Mayhew, the scion of a City stockbroking family who was proprietor of the popular Browns in Oxford before moving up to London. The antiquity of Rules, together with its strong visual appeal and concentration on historical British food, made it popular with tourists; but Mayhew was very demanding about ingredients, particularly meat and game. On one occasion, I recall, we went all the way up to his estate at Lartington, County Durham to lunch in a startling modern shooting box. This was the source of the game served in Rules. He also wanted to show us some Belted Galloway cattle that were his latest enthusiasm. Later he organised a comparative tasting between those Belties and South Devons from his family farm on the Surrey, Hampshire Border: precisely the same cuts, cooked the same way, and both, as I recall, superb, but very, very different.
Something didn’t seem quite right when I went to Rules last month, so I asked the head waiter about John. It transpired he had quietly sold Rules to the previous head waiter last year. It appeared to me that attention to detail had been lost, but maybe I am being unfair, and I need to give the place another chance to reassert itself. The new head waiter reassured me that the source of the meat had not changed. Whatever the case, John Mayhew will be a hard act to follow.
I didn’t study the wine list at Rules, else I might have seen whether or not Rules had joined the current national revival and added a lot of English and Welsh wines. I had been to a Welsh wine tasting on the 5th. The pioneer of Welsh wine in modern times at least was the Marquess of Bute, who planted vines at Castell Coch near Cardiff in 1875. The wits joked that Hock now had a rival in ‘Coch’. The vineyard ceased production in 1914 when a shortage of sugar caused by the naval blockade meant that they could no longer chaptalise musts.
There are now more than 50 vineyards in Welsh Wales. They are not cheap. Take the Ancre Hill Estate, their Sparkling Blanc de Noirs works out at £42.18. although I preferred the (also 100% Pinot Noir) Pefriog at almost half the price. There is a decent light still red Pinot Noir too for £34. One of my favourites was a Dry White from the Dale Vineyard made from Solaris which had a Riesling-like peachiness. Gwinllan Hebron made red wines from Rondo and Solaris. The Field Blend was on the spicy side, with good length. Both grape varieties reappeared at the Montgomery Vineyard where the best was a 2022 Seyval/Solaris blend.From the Dell Vineyard, Colfondo had potential. Velfrey had a pleasantly refreshing 2022 pet nat at £25 and the White Castle had a proper red, a 2022 Frühburgunder ‘Pinot Noir Précoce’ with Beaujolais ‘allures’ for £36; but it
should be added that, even now, you might obtain a good, full-bodied Beaujolais for a third of that. At those prices, Welsh wines will remain of regional significance for the time being.
More significant for those of us living on a shoe-string was a small Rhone tasting, although it was marred by significant gaps: there was no Hermitage, no SaintJoseph and no Châteauneuf-du-Pape. There were, on the other hand, half a dozen Cornas wines, including a lovely 2022 Domaine du Tunnel, which with its creamy black fruits and morello cherries, was the best wine in the tasting (albeit forward for a Cornas). The 2020 Chapoutier Les Arènes was more of a slow burner. The 2021 Jaboulet Les Grandes Terrasses and Alain Voge came joint third.
When I tasted Crozes-Hermitage in the past I looked for flowers: carnations and peonies. Now I seem to be looking in vain. None of the wines had that explosive nose that I once loved. The best were the 2022 Melody Friandise (drôle de nom!), the 2022 Chapoutier LesMeysonniers, and the 2020 Delas Domaine des Grands Chemins (at £44, twice the price of the others). Crozes used to be the poor man’s Hermitage. Who knows what
poor men may drink now?
The better wines in the rest of the tasting may be dealt with quite quickly. Alain Voge makes a sparkling St Péray with character. Among the still St Pérays, Courbis’s Le Tram was head and shoulders the best.Among the other whites, Roussanne dominated the Château Bois d’Arlène from Vacqueyras, which was an attractive wine. Of course, the real flirt is the Muscat de Beaumes de Venise, which is pretty well irresistible. The 2022 Domaine des Bernadins was a lemon-ricotta cake, while the 2023 Domaine de Fenouillet was a magnificent tarte au citron.
And now back to red: among the simple Côte du Rhônes,the 2022 Domaine de la Mordorée is unsurprisingly one of the best, but there were good examples too in the 2021 Les Cassagnes de la Nerthe, the Syrah-dominated 2020 Vignoble Anne Collard and the 2022 Plan de Dieu.
You’d expect better wines among the Côtes du Rhône Villages, and the 2020 Le Gravillas Mémoire des Vignerons was a good, earthy, Syrah-dominated wine.
The 2021 Gigondas Lacave, Le Dit du Bastidon in St Maurice was more Grenache, more redcurrant. The 2022 Domaine des Lauribert in Visan also had a good Syrah nose and then there was a fine quintet in Vacqueyras: a hearty 2022 La Bastide Saint Vincent; a powerful 2022 Ogier, La Pourpre; an excellent, 2021 Domaine Fontaine du Clos Castillon; a lighter 2021 Gigondas Lacave,Domaine de Carobelle dominated by Cinsault; and the finely-tuned 2020 Domaine de la Charbonnière – something meaty to get your teeth into, as a southern Rhone should be.
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