★★★☆☆
Good God, what a name. Gallery Mess. It sounds like a harbinger of Emin’s bedclothes, or a Hoxton installation of upturned bins and fox poo.
And there’s something weirdly, regressively infantile about the word ‘mess’. You don’t want it anywhere near food. When a child walks into the dining room and announces, ‘I’ve made a mess’, the only sound that follows is the icy tinkle of cutlery on china, knives and forks descending in unison to half-past-six. At best, the moppet means it’s flicked peas on the floor, spattered the walls with ketchup, or smeared Petits Filous across the small, fat face of its high-chaired sibling. At worst, it means… a lot worse. Mess and food go together like surgery and LSD.
Actually, it’s ‘mess’ as in ‘officers’’ – the Grand Old Duke of York once kept his precisely numbered men on this flat section of the King’s Road. I went with limited expectations. The menu has a pussy-footed predictability: burgers, ‘pasta of the day’, ‘chargrilled chicken breast’ and the dreary like. The specials are much more interesting (Thai beef salad with snake beans, duck salad with watermelon) but weirdly don’t appear online. These days, every restaurant that changes its menu should update its website simultaneously; perhaps, on this score, Gallery Mess is a work in progress.
The space is clinical and cold, with the white monotony of a Brian Eno track. A few wildly expensive sculptures are dotted about tastefully. Chris and I sat outside, in the almost gladey courtyard, with strollers strolling past and the sun shimmying behind the planes. We had a pretty long, pretty good lunch.
Gazpacho comes with cucumber and sun-blushed tomatoes at the bottom of the bowl. Annoyingly, inexplicably, you pour the soup yourself. As you know, this can be a truly great dish, but the version here is just passable. Over-oiled and timidly flavoured, it tastes sort of deflated, with the sun-blushed tomatoes clearly blushing out of embarrassment at their unwelcome acidity. A salad of lamb’s lettuce with duck and watermelon sounded horrendous – which is, naturally, why I ordered it – but proves delicious, with splashes of carmine fruit given body by a south-east-Asiany peanut dressing. It’s possible, though I could be wrong, that the duck was leftover from yesterday. If so, all to the good: such frugal creativity is welcome these days.
A saddle of lamb is chewily overcooked, though its couscous is intelligently spiced and the dish looks delightful. Salmon poached with sauce vierge is excellent – rosy and tender, bathing in extra virgin and speckled with capers. A knickerbocker glory is bizarrely constructed with peanut brittle and bashed up crème brûlée, though its fruit bleeds juicily within. Rhubarb crumble lacks that gooey glory when fruit has surged into crust – instead, the ’barb lies morosely at the bottom of the dish, and the crumble is dusty and raw.
Overall, though, Gallery Mess is ideal for a spot of lunch after a morning shopping on the KR. Its product is far better than you’d expect in a gallery caff. If that sounds condescending, it shouldn't: most food in museums, or any other public building, is like the Taxidermy Section crossed with the Rocks Room. The staff were smiling and enthusiastic, and seemed as happy to be in the sunshine as we were. Not really a mess at all, then.
Gallery Mess Café/Bar, Saatchi Gallery, King's Road, London SW3
Tel.: +44 (0)20 7730 8135
See on the Map
Lunch for two, excluding drinks and service, costs £40
www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/gallerymess
If ever they come for me in the middle of the night – figures round the bed, door in splinters, torchlights red on sweaty face – I know what I’ll fight them for. I know what’ll get me wriggling and writhing, the thought that’ll fling me out the door, unshod, to curses and flurry. (Admittedly, as this blog continues, the only part of me capable of producing any movement is my bowel, but that’s beside the point.) What is it?
Now London has some decent British restaurants, most of which suckled at the teat of St. John. (Which is not a phrase you’ll read in the Catholic Encyclopaedia.) For the most part, though, our cooking is a stay-at-home girl, shredding her suet by the whisper of the Aga and the fart of the Labrador. Like everything in Britain, the best and most interesting food remains aspiced in class, primly reserved for metropolitan sorts who’ll eat a Mrs King pork pie or pay seven quid for bone marrow and parsley salad. In France, it’s different. There’s self-assured pride – often mistaken for arrogance – in a national granary of dishes, which everybody knows and which you can eat throughout the country. Food remains the bottom-up, bottoms-up bedrock of their culture, and they’re richer for it.
£19.50 gets you three courses. I start with a junipery morteau sausage with lentils, the pig given life by the pulse (droll, that one). It’s rustic in a polished sort of way. Cargy has a stellar pork rillette, the lightest I’ve ever tasted. There’s a lid of set fat which she detaches to limit her lard intake – though I finish it – and some cornichons to bring vital acidity. Rabbit in mustard sauce is faultless – toothsome clumps of bunny falling from spindly bones. A green salad crunches with endive, bitter as Al Gore, and there’s a firm, pearly piece of sea bream, cloyed by a slightly over-rich lobster sauce. For puddings, a haughty île flottante, the whites not dissimilar to candyfloss, in a custard haunted with vanilla. Last, an exquisite apple tatin to share, the pastry flaked with jammy gooeyness, the prim fruit carrying just a little, welcome bite.
Now it’s true that I’ve only been once, for the lunch deal. And if I’d come for a midweek dinner, and spent £18 on lamb navarin with boulangères, I’d have judged the place by different standards. But I ate what I ate here, and I paid what I paid – and on that basis, this was my best London meal so far this year.
When the food arrives, I realise The Salisbury offers the gastronomic equivalent of The Crying Game. It all looks great until… aah. One tapa is a ‘veggy Scotch egg’. Why anyone would conceive of such a thing is completely beyond me. It’s a hardish-boiled egg in breadcrumbs on a puddle of capery oil. (There’s a similar recipe in the most staggeringly pointless 
Chipolatas are bog-standard, their chutney unpleasantly tepid. A salad of pea shoots with feta and balsamic glaze is excellent, though: crisp and green and summery, with fresh cheese, though the vinegar does nothing for it. ‘Pete’s curry’ is tasty, smoothed with coconut milk and smoky with cumin. Gnocchi and smoked chicken are scalding globules with clumps of string. Ten quid says they came straight from the microwave. A side bowl of cabbage is faultless, basking in melted butter and spiked with infant roundels of chive.
Amongst the mains, a pie of pork, apple and cider is good, with a big honk of piggy knuckle, sealed by pastry flaking in filigrees round the edges. Mum has a crab tart with a couple of prawns. It’s steep at £12, and the tart, though well flavoured, is grossly undercooked, leaching onto the plate (an annoying wooden plank) in a slow vomity puddle. Pudding is a deconstructed strawberry cheesecake: a clutch of Elsantas with a bit of cream and some soggy Digestives mixed with butter. It looks like a rat run over by a lawnmower in the snow.
In a breathless preamble to its menu, The Wine Theatre makes much of its ‘philosophy’, the ‘aperitivo’. There’s a great deal of branding puff around ‘aperitivo’, as if it were the most radical gastronomic concept since Theophanu, the tenth century Byzantine Empress, popularised the fork. From what I can gather, ‘aperitivo’ consists of a free nibble with your drink. Hardly the Shock of the New.
Robert’s starter reeks all the way from the kitchen. It’s a noisome dish of pastey sardines and overcooked onions spattered with raisins, like fishy muesli. I have a revolting salad of squid and olives. The squid is pre-frozen and cut into stumpy fag-butts, surrendering all pretence of flavour. The olives are sliced, and straight from a tin. At what point, do you think, does someone decide an olive would taste better sliced? Do these people lie in the bath and say to themselves: ‘Olives are a perfect size to pop in your mouth. Humans have grown them for as long as they’ve grown anything. We have machines nowadays that stone them if you can’t face spitting out the pip or putting your dentures in. So the only way we can improve on this is by cutting them up into meanly astringent little slices, like caustic Polo mints, and steeping them in horrendous vinegar’?
My main course is slightly better. ‘Fettucine with prawns’ turns out to be a clump of coldish pasta with two anaemic prawns on the side. It comes with courgettes (the menu promised rocket) which were cooked ages ago and are bracken-brown and slimey; and some chunks of cat-food tuna. The prawns weren’t prepped properly, and each carries a streak of intestinal waste down its back. Robert has a lasagne which I strangely forget to taste, though it doesn’t look bad. I finish with an amaretto crème brûlée, which had sounded interesting. But rather than spiking it with Amaretto liqueur, which I’d hoped for, they’ve crushed amaretti biscuits into the custard, a terrible idea. The soggy crumbs give it a mouthfeel like a frog spawned in it. I don’t finish it.
