http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/eating_out/giles_coren/article5074781.eceYork & Albany stood derelict at the top of Parkway in Camden Town for God knows how many years. Probably 20. Possibly more. And during that time I passed it by car, bicycle or bus almost every day. Until about five years ago, its total, abject, wrist-slitting dereliction was underlined by trompe l’oeils painted on the dirty walls which were designed to give the (not altogether convincing) impression that men and women in Victorian dress (top hats, parasols, twirling canes, etc) were inside, drinking and laughing and horsing around as only the Victorians could.
Now, my guess is that those silhouettes were not painted on there in the Victorian era itself, since there were enough people around in those days with real top hats and parasols that one did not need to paint silhouettes of them on one’s walls.
My guess is that they were done much later, possibly in the middle Sixties, and that the place must already have been doing pretty badly, to think that its best hope of getting a new crowd in was to pretend that the place was full of 100-year-old people getting sloshed.
But for as long as I can remember, the place stood empty. And it was easy to see why, for it stands at one of the rankest junctions in North London, where a hellish number of roads collide at a yellow box the size of Warrington, and you never see anyone on foot. Gazing at the gallivanting Victorian silhouettes, it was impossible to imagine that there had ever been merriment there.
And then a few years ago, some boards went up and the silhouettes disappeared. Someone, it was said, had bought it. Some lunatic. A couple of years later the boards came down and there were real windows and what looked like a sort of restaurant inside. But then that stood empty. And then the builders came back. And people said that it was Gordon Ramsay who’d bought it this time. And nobody believed it. “Talk about kitchen nightmares,” we said. “He won’t know what’s hit him.”
But Gordon has made very few bad moves in the hospitality business, and perhaps his interest heralds a turnaround. After all, in the years since the place fell silent Chalk Farm has been renamed “Primrose Hill”, and that part of Camden has become “Regent’s Park”. A lot of typical GR punters, approaching from the direction of Notting Hill and Chelsea, will drive through Regent’s Park and think it seems awfully nice. And if they find the York & Albany first time, and find a parking space, then they’ll be fine. But if they overshoot, and get funnelled down Parkway towards Camden Town Tube station and the dog-hole centre of Skankville, NW1, then they will get a terrible shock.
My mother, as it happens, lives just around the corner from it, in the nice direction, opposite the park, and so I took her for lunch. The place looked terrific. The building, I now realise, is a classic Regency coaching inn, and from inside, through the giant, gleamingly clean, superhumanly sound-proofed windows, the ratty junction looked almost peaceful.
We wound round the bar, past a little posh deli they’ve installed, to the ground-floor dining room, which was packed and chatty, and ate a three-course (three choices per course) set lunch for a staggering £15. And it was fabulous, too. The food here has been put in the hands of Angela Hartnett, who hasn’t opened a restaurant in, ooh, weeks, and she, in turn, has brought in a head chef called Colin Buchan (the chain of command can be snake-long in a GR Holdings gaff, but it always seems to work pretty well).
There was a lovely warm chicken liver parfait in a Kilner jar by way of an appetiser, then a perfect caramelised onion tart, and then an awesome square of very slow-braised pork belly with black pudding and a great pudding – I forget what. We drank tap water and coffee and got out for 40 quid. Just bloody astounding. The deal of the decade.
But then I felt bad for being a cheapskate; too many punters as tight as that and Gordon’s empire could come crashing down like, I dunno, a bank. So I went back the next day with a mob (two chefs and a couple of saucy birds), and waggled my plastic a bit.
At night, the place came into its own. The bar wasn’t too full and the view of the scary crossroads, headlamps and traffic lights twinkling in the dark, was positively cool. The tables and upright chairs are a bit boardroom, but it’s a New Yorky, business/pleasure vibe. It’ll work.
We drank Manhattans straight up (because that’s how they came) and then had them on the rocks in lowball glasses (because that is how I prefer them) and then had them again in a 2:3 split because the girls preferred them the first way. And then we fell downstairs.
Which was just as well, because what we fell into was the funnest, sexiest eating space in all of Gordon’s restaurants. And don’t tell me that’s not saying much, because this was gorgeous: a long, curving “pass” dividing a big open kitchen from a tart’s boudoir of red satin wallpaper and loungey red sofas around tables. Fin-de-siècle brothel (top hats, parasols…) meets the River Café, and rocks.
My two chef buddies felt sorry for the boys in the kitchen because “they’re on show the whole time and can’t arse about”. But sod that, they’re here to cook, and did so beautifully. It’s bistro stuff at bistro prices with Angela Hartnett quality control, and that means damn, damn fine eating.
Perfectly done middle-brow dishes included: a salad of deep-fried lamb’s tongue and mache lettuce; fried duck’s egg with field mushrooms, Jerusalem artichoke and parmesan; game mosaic with sourdough; oven-baked halibut with chorizo and white beans; red snapper with confit lemon and couscous; Casterbridge rib-eye (last seen at Maze Grill) with gratinated bone marrow; other stuff…
Me, personally, I had the braised neck of lamb with garlic potato purée and long shafts of carrot and parsnip. So good. Such distinct autumnal flavours and colours, only straightforward but done without putting the tiniest foot wrong.
My chefs did wonder if the risotto wasn’t a bit underdone, and then ponced on about its being so hard to get spot on, and how it’s not really a restaurant dish, until the dollies and I began to yawn, scarfed a couple of treacle sponges that were, said the girls, like, totally OMFG, and headed back up to the bar to tuck into a bottle of Ardbeg.
Around 1am, my girlfriend and I shoved our pals out of the door and scuttled upstairs to one of the bedrooms, just because Gordon has never done rooms before and he’s got a handful here, and I thought we should check them out.
Ours was charming, bonsai-Regency with underfloor heating in the bathroom, telly (but, disappointingly, no porn – Gordon’s such an old prude), slightly rickety four-poster, unbelievable 400 thread-count cotton, zzzz…
In the morning: a ripping breakfast of sausage, egg, bacon, black pudding and faultless espresso that perfectly patrolled the rustic-poncey border territory that a good fry-up must these days; the paying of a whopping bill (to be fair, they threw in the bed for good behaviour); and off for a turn round the zoo (five minutes’ walk away) to throw rocks at the pandas.
Except that there aren’t any pandas any more. Or elephants. Or rhinos. We didn’t see a herd of anything really massive until a coach-load of schoolchildren from Plymouth arrived. They were so porky and numerous one felt they’d be best viewed from above, by hot-air balloon, swarming across the Transvaal towards a kebab shop.
Averting my gaze from the greasy hordes, I looked up at the pretty, gabled roof of the old birdhouse and saw, on a plaque, that it was built in 1869. And, oh, how I dreamt myself in the zoo 100-odd years ago, promenading among the silhouettes of top-hatted gentlemen and ladies with parasols…
York & Albany
127-129 Parkway, London NW1
(020-7388 3344)
Cooking: 8
General thing: 9
Prawns: 10
Score: 9
Price: As I said, I did less than £40 on lunch and you-don’t-want-to-know-what on supper. But I could probably have got us out for £60 a head if I were a different sort of person.
