LONDON PUBS House and garden: Lunch on the terrace at the Sir Charles Napier (right) can begin with champagne on the lawn ( below) and a scallop starter ( far right) talk (or not) and perhaps play darts. If they were hungry they might have some salt-and-vinegar potato chips, a pickled egg or a bag of pork scratchings – chewy nuggets of pork rind that often still had pig hairs attached. Sophisticated it was not. Growing up in a small village in Yorkshire in northern England in the 1970s, I saw the twilight days of that world. Sometimes my brother and I would sneak into the local pub, the Fox and Hounds, to buy a packet of potato chips with our allowance. It was a dark and dingy place of sticky surfaces, beer-soaked carpets and stale tobacco. Edgar the landlord, cigarette stuck to his lower lip, would take our money, hand over the chips and then yell at us to get out. How times change. That same pub in Yorkshire is now smoke-free and has things never seen in Edgar’s day: cutlery, napkins, pinot noir, children. Some changes, such as the smoking ban, have been forced on pubs but other changes are voluntary. Landlords have become increasingly aware that warm beer, a vinegary egg and a game of darts are no longer enough to entice people from the comfort of their homes. After all, you can buy beer more cheaply at the supermarket. So pubs have started to offer something you can’t always get at home – great food. THE PUB WIDELY CREDITED with being the first to offer top-notch food stands on a drab street in Clerkenwell, East London, one of those areas that no one seemed to go to until it became wildly fashionable a few years ago. During the week, when the people who work here are at their desks, the streets are fairly quiet but at the weekend it’s like one of those films in which a zombie virus has wiped out all the Londoners. The Eagle landed here in 1991, opposite a multistory parking lot, but no one comes here for the view. They come for the food and the atmosphere, and this Sunday lunchtime both are in fine form. A group of old men occupies the green Chesterfield sofas, a young couple with a baby sit at the next table, and a young lad, presumably a relative of one of the employees, is perched at the bar drinking a Coca-Cola and reading the cartoons in the Sunday paper. Behind the bar a pair of boisterous Italian chefs work in a space not much larger than the galley of a small yacht. Plumes of flame regularly shoot up from the hob as they prepare and plate up grilled sardines, orecchiette, Greekstyle lamb, tapas, squid, chorizo... The menu, like the staff, is European with English influences. I order a pint and browse the menu, written on a chalkboard behind the bar, deciding on Yorkshire lamb that’s been roasted for seven hours ($20). Bobo chooses a steak sandwich ($15). The lamb is so tender it falls apart if you look at it sharply; the sandwich is huge. The food is served on mismatched plates with mismatched cutlery. The only thing that’s consistent, judging from the faces around me, is that everything is delicious. 58 DECEMBER 2012/JANUARY 2013 SCANORAMA
SCANORAMA DECEMBER 2012/JANUARY 2013 59 XXXXXX Sun or shade?: Julie Griffiths (right), owner of the Sir Charles Napier �