En route to Fenn in Fulham, I comforted myself that this may, please God, be one of the last restaurants I’ll visit during the alfresco period. We were ever so grateful when outdoor dining restored a semblance of semi-normality, but let’s be very honest, not one sane soul will pine for this season of swamped booking systems and damp bum cheeks.
I’ve accepted 3.45pm dinner bookings to eat under dripping tarpaulin, I’ve wangled my way into limited-menu brunches in repurposed loading bays and I’ve eaten pommes boulangère while dressed like Hagrid, with harsh, unforgiving daylight exposing the map of fine lines on my forehead, which I’d much prefer to hide in a flatteringly lit banquette.
All this has only given me fresh empathy and gratitude for the proto-human species 1.9m years ago in Tanzania’s Olduvai gorge, who, some argue, built the first houses. Walls and ceilings, it turns out, are really, really bloody brilliant. I have missed the notion of putting a coat in the cloakroom, settling in, getting cosy and lingering a little too long. As for spontaneity, I wonder sometimes if we’ll ever “pop out for a drink” or “pop out for a bite to eat” ever again. Gosh, I miss “popping”. No planning or booking a table for two weeks on Wednesday; just impromptu popping. What heaven that was. An American friend once told me that popping was a uniquely British thing, similar in its adorable quaintness to “grabbing a cheeky Nandos”. The British, perhaps more than any other culture, adore the notion that they’ve sneaked a totally unscheduled hour of boozing or eating into an otherwise banal day. This is why cafes in garden centres are so insanely popular, and why the best part of Ikea is popping to the restaurant for meatballs and Daim bar cake.
Still, I’m glad I persevered with fighting for a booking for Fenn, which I made three weeks beforehand, because as far as “eating out” went, it turned out to be one of the classiest examples. Fenn is a modern European, date night kind of restaurant with an elegant, enclosed terrace. It is from the team behind Nest in Hackney, and its head chef, Joe Laker, was previously at Anglo in Farringdon, a place I often recommend to London visitors for its imaginative menu, which treads exactly the right line for diners who want to experiment with fine, artsy dining, but also, importantly, want dinner. Fenn has flourishes that call back to both those venues, serving lovingly imagined, thoughtfully sourced, but not overly earnest plates made from scratch and offered as a set menu for £45 per head, or à la carte.
FFC (Fenn fried chicken) is a feisty, peppery, high-end spin on KFC-style popcorn chicken nuggets, while the beef tartare is a generous, almost crimson portion dusted in fermented chilli powder and with a rich, smoky oil. Even the freshly baked, pillowy potato sourdough, which comes in slices that are thick enough to rest your head on, is a labour of love.
A pyramid of chewy dumplings, more like dough balls, sits prettily on a plate of Lincolnshire poacher cheese; this is the dish you’re most likely to want to take a photo of, if aesthetics are your thing. You can add grated truffle for an extra £6 if you’re feeling like Kim Kardashian. Whopping hand-dived scallops bathe in roasted chicken butter. They make their own Tabasco-style sauce to serve with Cornish rock oysters, at £3 each; it is sunrise in a saucer, with just the right amount of salt and fire. I’ve been wary of anyone trying to recreate well-loved, mass-produced tastes ever since my grandmother swore she could make Heinz salad cream with white spirit vinegar and egg yolk. (Spoiler: she could not.)
Among the larger plates at £20-30, which could be classed as main courses (or split), the Yorkshire beef – rump and cheek with potato cake – is very good, particularly its vivid emerald puddle of pureed sprouting broccoli with such depth of exuberant flavour that Charles and I kept going back to it, extolling its wonder like Lord Percy in Blackadder discovering “green”. “How does he make broccoli taste so much of broccoli?’ I asked the staff in the manner of a woman who had ordered a tequila-based cocktail called The Protagonist as an aperitif, before moving on to a large glass of Cantina Orsogna Primitivo and who was therefore possibly not wholly eloquent. They were more than lovely about my questions. Fenn offers the kind of casual yet caring service that verges on Michelin standard, but could equally be the cafe on the corner.
Fenn was good when it was only half working, so by the time you get there, the place will be flying. The nutmeg-laden custard tart is stupendous. I’ll be popping back, whenever popping makes its big resurgence.
