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Spectator
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
A man's restaurant: Victor Garvey at the Midland Grand reviewed
The Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras Station is George Gilbert Scott's masterpiece: his Albert Memorial in Hyde Park (a big dead prince under a big gold cross) has just too much sex to it. Late Victorian architecture seethes with erotica. The facetious will say imperialism was really just penetration, and there's something in that. It is now the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel, London – oh, the fretted imaginings of marketing departments – and, on a more conscious level, the closest you will get to the great age of rail, though spliced with plastic now. The modern station is ugly and translucent and sells face cream to tourists, and buns. But it hasn't lost its drama. This is the gateway to Europe and Derby. There is a monumental statue of lovers embracing by the platforms: it is 30ft high, and bronze. I think her skirt is from Hobbs, but I went to a girls' school. Inside is Victor Garvey at the Midland Grand, formerly the Gilbert Scott, a fine-dining restaurant (the phrase should be suppressed) in the French style (Garvey's grandmother was Charles de Gaulle's cook). The hotel's interiors – bloody Catholic neo-Gothic – are familiar from a bewildering panorama of films, which I should like to see welded together, and here: Richard III, The Secret Garden, Batman Begins. But sumptuousness does not intrude into the dining room; rather, the drama stops. It's a lovely room, tall and curved, and they have broken it. Neo-Gothicis camp itself: too much is not enough, as sang the Kids from Fame. Blood will have blood. This is decorated with creams and browns, possibly because men – this is a man's restaurant – think bright colours are feminine, to which I say: meet William Morris. Someone has installed Art Deco lighting. I know worse things happened to the Midland Grand when it was a British Rail office, but still. We are on a vast table on a small stage. It feels like Posh and Becks's wedding. The staff are young, charming and very literal. They stick to the script. And that is French haute cuisine, skilled to the point of agonised. There is a menu gourmandise for £179 and a menu experience for £139. (Wine pairings are £99 to £219.) We eat à la carte, because tasting menus are torture. Even so, we are brought, unasked, a dish of tomato stripped, remade and laid with flowers. I know Garvey is a brilliant chef. I can feel his childhood strivings. Faced with them at dinner, I just wish he'd try less hard. Whatever he performs on his tomato – and he does every-thing you can conceive of, and somethings you can't – it is already perfect. He is tilting at tomato phantoms. We eat Devon rock crab with sweet pea and seaweed vinegar, shrouded with foam (£28); a jumbo quail with girolles, broken apart and reconstituted as if by a tiny murderous Borrower (£32); tortellini with morel (£29). If it is all intense – this food needs Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor to accompany it – the only real failure is the tortellini. It appears under a slick of foam so thick I think I am driving in fog. You clear the foam as if seeking an airway: food as a scream for resuscitation. The warm bread, though, is perfect. All gifted chefs do this. It is a taunt. Still, the clients – tables of financiers, you can tell from the haircuts – seem happy. On the wall is a cracked mirror. If they look hard enough – and they won't – they will see Garvey's ideal version of themselves. Sign up for the Lunchtime Espresso newsletter Sign up
New York Times
18-02-2025
- New York Times
London's Most Despised Thoroughfare Is Actually Kind of Great
Euston Road isn't the kind of place Londoners go on purpose. It's a wretched six-lane thoroughfare between King's Cross and Great Portland Street, high both in levels of air pollution and in the number of people in a traffic-induced tizz. It's a place you suffer through on your way to somewhere more pleasant. 'Meet you on Euston Road!' said nobody, ever. A hundred years ago, the English critic and journalist Sidney Dark called Euston Road 'the most depressing thoroughfare in central London.' Noting the three train stations among its dismal landmarks, he wrote: 'The position of these stations is evidence of the Englishman's queer habit of showing his worst side to the world. I can imagine a stranger arriving at Euston Station, walking out into Euston Road, exclaiming 'So this is London!' and immediately going home again.' I used to hate it, too. I've missed trains and been late for work and even my godson's baptism because of that road. When I got my first car in the summer of 2020 and started driving with my sister from London to my parents' house, we used to make bets on how long it would take us to get down what we called the 'Pooston Road' (20 minutes was about standard for the mile-long stretch). As we treacled along in my little Yaris, I would track landmarks to measure our progress: the tangle of bikes outside the British Library; what used to be a squat cider bar outside Euston Station; the first Premier Inn; the second Premier Inn. It wasn't long before I realized that I actually looked forward to these sights, even needed them. I was stuck in a traffic jam, and if I wanted entertainment, I'd better start looking out the window. Soon, I was noticing the patterns and novelties of the road with fondness. I guessed who the Parisians fresh off the Eurostar might be; I liked logging the color of today's supercars beneath the rosy Gothic spindles of the St. Pancras Hotel. I marveled at how this ecstatic George Gilbert Scott edifice shared space with gray tower blocks, as well as shops and cafes anonymous in their garishness. Together these buildings trace the contours of change in the city, its history jumbled out of order on a slightly shabby street. And there, paying no mind to any of it, are the hundreds of bodies jostling against one another as they get to wherever it is they're going. But they should! For Euston Road is in fact the most generous of thoroughfares. It's the site of the longest Champagne bar in Europe, five Pret-a-Mangers and a phenomenal E.R. that I recommend to anyone considering breaking a bone. On one end is an unpopular underpass, where someone has left belongings tucked into a polluted corridor of cars for safety. On the other, taxis disgorge well-heeled visitors on the doorstep of the retro Standard Hotel. Opposite is the fat and welcoming British Library, composed of 10 million bricks, a number that merely nips at the toes of the 60-million-brick St. Pancras Hotel next door. Best of all are the caryatids of the St. Pancras New Church, four toga-wearing terra-cotta ladies who bear part of the roof, austerely holding the gaze of passengers on the top level of the No. 30 bus. When I pass Euston Station, London's midcentury commuter-hell answer to Penn Station, I sometimes think about how, in 2021, activists protesting a new high-speed train line burrowed tunnels beneath it. I read in a news article at the time that one of them was called Jimbino Vegan, a name that dogged my thoughts until I remembered that a barefoot busker in a park handed me a flier with that same name on it in the weeks before the dig. Or I think about one night when the street was thronged with carousing Scots, some in kilts, most of them singing, who came to London for a soccer match. I loved the idea that these men took the train all the way down from Scotland to King's Cross and decided that the constellation of cruddy pubs a few meters away from the station was a reasonable place to end their journey. Dumb reminiscences like these speak to the way our lives puddle into the architecture of a city; the way we sketch buildings and paving stones and traffic intersections with our memories, the way places become ours when we compile little facts and stories about them. The house that used to be over there, a person you once saw and can't forget. I want to say there's nowhere like Euston Road (I feel confident that in no other city has the site of something called the Great Dust Heap been replaced by an ancient, unmarked stone and a betting shop with tinted windows). But all cities have streets that vibrate similarly with life and mess and history. Euston and the dirty, busy, lived-in streets like it are marvelous because they're where our experience of a place collides with what's already there. Isn't that why we live in cities in the first place? To feel our existence rubbing against everyone else's? At least that's how I feel now whenever I return to London. I shuttle from an overstuffed plane to an overstuffed rush-hour Tube from Heathrow, and when I get off, dog tired, at King's Cross, it isn't to space or calm or anything remotely people-free. I walk on to Euston Road, I take in the cranes, the cabs, the Ladbrokes, the high arches set in the honeyed stone of the station and that weathered, inscrutable stone across the road, and I know that I'm home.
