‘This is as good as food gets in London' – Town, in Drury Lane, reviewed

Spectator

19 hours ago

Town – well-named, it has vitality – is on the ragged part of Drury Lane WC2 near the Majestic Wine Warehouse and Travelodge. Like musical theatre, whose home this district still is, it is so ebullient and desirous of being loved that it is impossible not to love it back, because it seethes with that rare thing in days of ennui: enthusiasm. It is Judy Garland before the drugs won out and Max Bialystock of The Producers before he lost the pearl in his cravat pin and fell to shagging little old ladies to fund bad plays. It is not exactly the fag end of Covent Garden reborn – we need ragged parishes in over-polished London – but it is more interesting than the awful deadness of the piazza, which is now Westfield-near-Thames. Town is joyful, and London, so wracked with criticism – fumes of self-hatred and decline – needs it.
It lives in a red-brick Edwardian building with a grand doorway and pale pediment. It looks like a municipal swimming baths, and there is nothing wrong with that: every street should have one, as we only bother to remember during heatwaves, by which time it is too late to do anything about it. Inside, it is Star Wars meets Trash Disco: a Death Star ceiling; a bizarre oval central bar in apple green; shining red pillars; yellow glass partitions; chairs in cream and beige, because more colour would blow the diner's head off, and that is what the alcohol – this is also a serious bar – is for. The designer, who is clearly a madman in the style of Augustus Pugin, also did Ambassadors Clubhouse off Regent Street. He thinks minimalism is disgusting, and this is fine. Who can cope with minimalism in wretched days? To me, civilisation is a white dwarf star: it brightens before it explodes.
Here we have expertise in service. The waiting staff are, to a woman, excellent: capable, beautiful and kind. They are like idealised nurses, or mothers. They are not young, which I appreciate, because I am not young either, and what ecstasy the colour-blocking in the room exudes, they match in flesh. Town, like a West End show – this is explicitly dining as theatre, it hums with pleasure – is well-reviewed. They know they have a hit, and they meet it. For £150 for two (including a lot of alcohol) you sit in the stalls.
The food is from Stevie Parle of Joy at Portobello. I have eaten predictable, overpriced food in recent months – in a room decorated like a country house I narrowly avoided a plate of duck for £52, which is neurotic and absurd – but this has real love in it, and it feels both familiar and weird, as good food should. If it has a genre – though it seems to defy one – it is modern Mediterranean with seams of British flesh. We eat an immense round potato sourdough loaf with bone-marrow gravy and a sprig of rosemary as thick as a human finger, and then fall to meat: beautiful, creamy Coombeshead-cured mangalitsa shoulder; wine-cured wild-farmed beef with candied walnuts and cheese whizz, lying like a pliant animal in a garden; a fine, plain rump steak; duck and Amarone pappardelle, with cinnamon, chilli, juniper and smoked almond, prettier than it should be; beef-fat pink fir potatoes, which we could not eat because the colour-blocking had overstimulated us and we ordered too much. This is as good as food gets in London, and it is served with charming, if dystopic, mania. Go to Town before it explodes.