★★★★★
Awful name, Terroirs. It's that niggling, wriggling little plural, the silent S gilding an already ponced-up lily. The word's yet to enter anything like ordinary English, of course, and remains a fairly prissy piece of jargon - a loanword adopted cautiously, as you might a young offender. Try to Anglicise it, though, say it in an English accent, and you sound like Lloyd Grossman. Tear-warr. Scientific research - I will not disclose my methods - leads me to conclude that only 13.6 per cent of the British public has the slightest clue what it means. As a name for a restaurant, then, Terroirs is about as democratic as Chad. And for the few who do know it, it’s a daft bit of underselling by the wine merchant owners, a misbranding on the scale of Woolworth’s ‘Lolita’ range of kiddie furniture. Because ‘terroir’, reeking as it does of swill and spittoon, of noble rot and pigeage entre-deux-mers, implicitly suggests that food here plays second fiddle to plonk. Which it doesn’t.
The restaurant opened six months ago but has been shamefully underreviewed, no doubt in part due to this barmy ‘wine bar’ marketing. It doesn’t even have a proper website, just (like Jesus) a ‘Coming Soon’ message. As the first photo shows, the exterior is understated to the point of concealment; and despite being a Molotov cocktail’s throw from Trafalgar Square, it’s pretty hard to find. You can imagine tourists shuffling past, staled and stupefied by the National Gallery: rattled parents tugging slack-jawed ten-year-olds, seeing the name and assuming it sells dogs.
I went with London Eater and the editor of Metrotwin, a crafty website that links Big Smoke with Big Apple. It was a magnificent lunch. The wine list, which naturally deserves attention, places emphasis on small growers and biodynamic producers, and has a groaning rack of organic bottles. The menu is self-consciously arresting, rustically artful, utterly du moment. Small, tapas-style plates are very vogueish right now, with Bocca di Lupo doing a similar thing. It’s a concept that caters for the picky, the sociable, the pinched and the stingy alike. Here, depending on wallet and appetite, you nibble or scoff. There are bar snacks priced at a couple of quid, several small dishes at £4 to £9, or half a dozen main courses, each under £15. There’s also a good selection of charcuterie and some cheeses, the latter £3.50 apiece. In short, it’s a place that comfortably allows for a drink and a nibble, a medium snack, or a substantial meal. You can guess which one we plumped for.
In fact, we order so much it’s almost embarrassing. From the bar snacks, cervelle de canut, 'silk worker's brain', a base of fromage blanc muddled by vinegar, is a delight: refreshing and milky, drizzled with what I’m pretty sure is walnut oil, and dressed with tiny rings of chive. Another taster, though, is a let-down. Duck scratchings, which sounded promising, are crisped boils, bitty explosions of cold grease. Amongst the smaller plates, steak tartare is available with or without heat: we order it spicy, and though it lacks an appreciable kick, it’s fresh, eggy and sharp, budded with a capery tang and excellent on hot toast. A pricey (£9) bunch of new season asparagus is perfectly cooked – so many places underdo it nowadays – with a vibrant splodge of hollandaise.
Bone marrow with truffle (oil, naturally) is the best dish of all: jellied discs of tissue wobbling like the busts on can-can dancers, dotted on a thickly foresty duxelle. Clams steamed in vermouth are plump and juicy, in a delicate, wormwoody sauce with grassy currents of parsley and a garlicky dollop of aioli. A pot-roast quail with braised artichokes is mellowed yellow, the bird of an infant tenderness, in a sauce salty with pancetta and with that curious sweet-and-sour note of the thistle. Puddings too, of course: a clever crèpe made with a caramel of salted butter, double-taking the tongue; and the best panna cotta I’ve ever had, quivering like a dumped lover’s bottom lip, its vanilla richness sliced by blood oranges steeped in Campari.London badly needed a place like this, dextrously serving honest, compelling food in a sociable and unpretentious setting. The concept, for want of a better word, is as up-to-date as the Speaking Clock. The young chef is Ed Wilson, who trained with the Galvin brothers and who somehow produces everything from an open-plan kitchen slightly larger than a hankie, with just a couple of electric griddles and not even any gas. Pricing is ludicrously low for a restaurant of this calibre. The current lunch deal is a tartiflette, a green salad and a glass of ingenious white for ten measly pounds. I’m going back next week.
Now, any suggestions for a new name?
Terroirs, 5 William IV Street, London WC2
Tel. +44 (0)20 7036 0660
See on the TFYS Map
Indefensibly large lunch for three, including drinks and service, costs £138
Now, don’t get me wrong. I love rediscovered, born-again, new-fangled British food as much as the next man. I respect the compromise of old and new, the feel for memory and season, the roots in history and soil. I like mutton, jugged hare and Sussex pond pudding. I think an honorific for Fergus Henderson is long overdue. (Though 
‘Tap or mineral water?’
20 minutes pass, an aeon at a foodless table. A fennel and wild garlic soup tingles with aniseed. It’s flecked with green strips of wild garlic leaves, but not, oddly, with their flavour. This is essentially a cream of fennel soup, with a dim chivey whiff. I rarely add salt to a dish, but I do here, and plenty of pepper. Crab on toast is better – a rich smear of brown, flushed with lemon, on crumby toast. The meat has a decent pastiness, but again, needs lifting with salt. It’s strange: the ingredients are obviously excellent, but something is missing.
Hours seem to pass before the main courses show up. Little is as fraught and anxiously depressing, as thumb-twiddlingly, wine-sippingly painful, as a long wait for restaurant food. C is excellent company, but we’ve come here to eat, and the excitement and pleasure of the evening begin to ebb like a dying Catherine wheel. When the food finally appears, and I’ve shaved off my white beard, it’s a mixed bag. Onglet is an insole, with cold and mealy chips. Calf’s liver is milky and perfectly cooked, budding with lentils and those wintry flaps of kale. Ox cheeks are the dish of the evening, collapsing like they’ve run a marathon, richly sauced in flavoursome, slow-cooked murk. There’s proud and fluffy mash too, unlike the puddle popularised by Joël Robuchon. It’s an excellent dish, exactly the sort of thing you hope for in a restaurant like this. Sad, then, that it should be the only plate to stand out.
I finish with a rhubarb meringe, apparently assembled by a dyspraxic three year-old. I know that Hereford Road is about unadorned food, none-of-your-poncy-frou-frou-stuff-here-matey, but well, you know... look at it. It tastes a bit better: the fruit is zingily tart, which compensates for the overcooked meringue. And hang on… oh God. I reach to my lips and pull out a short, black, curly hair. The waitress apologises and politely sweeps away the plate, bringing another helping in its place. She knew I’d still want it.
Sambrook’s began brewing last August, in a desolate strip of Battersea. It’s a joint venture between David Welsh, who has 30 years’ experience in the trade, and Duncan Sambrook, twentysomething accountant-turned-brewer. Like many ideas – and people, come to that – it was spawned from a booze-up. But less commonly, this drunken brainwave has proved a success.
Duncan was hugely informative on the arcane craft of brewing – kettle and mash tun, liquor and gypsum. The brewery uses fresh hops, unlike the pellets more typical nowadays: three strains, with the gloriously English names of Fuggles, Goldings and Boadicea. It’s the last of these that gives Wandle its distinctive, proud astringency, and like the old battleaxe herself, it takes no prisoners. Fresh hops, with their weedy green aroma, are a lot more work, and in the past, Duncan has had to clamber into the tanks to fish out buckets of sodden strobiles. It’s too much to say that his labour seasons the beer, but it’s testament to his commitment for the project.
The Westbridge is simply a gem of a gastropub, serving simple but well-executed food in a setting of undistilled nostalgia. The stairway down to the loos is decorated in vintage He-Man wallpaper, the sight of which gave me a Proustian jolt back to my childhood, the tinny theme and evocative nomenclature of that brilliant series: Grayskull, Orko, Eternia. Nick Drake plucks and twangs on the stereo. We ate meaty Irish rock oysters, splashing with osmazome, and then a good fish and chips with crispy, auburn batter and pearly flakes of pollock. A lamb steak looked excellent; and when I peeked at the prices, they were very reasonable. In total, we tasted six beers by the third-pint (which, it 
Writing about evenings like this, in which you eat and drink for free, it’s perhaps harder to show that you approached the experience in as balanced a fashion as normal. There are two things I’d say to this. The first is the obvious point that in a restaurant, good service can enhance your enjoyment of the food. So, in reality, I write about these places just as I would anywhere that treated me well, or which I felt had gone the extra mile. The second is more complex. Dishing out freebies can be counterproductive for restaurateurs. As customers, we all want to avoid seeming like we’ve been hoodwinked, or sensing we were gulled into being nice. As a result, when writing about the perks they’ve been given, bloggers can be harsher than normal, accentuating faults they might otherwise have let pass, so as to display their uncorruptibility. That, I hope, isn’t the case here. Duncan and Charlie have objectively excellent products, which they’re keen to share and profit from. I certainly don’t blame them for it - in fact, I salute them.
