The Pelican, London: utterly lovely gastropubbery — review

I’ve got to admit that I wasn’t expecting pyrotechnics from The Pelican. A gastropub in Notting Hill isn’t usually the sort of thing I’d cross town for, but I was due to meet my daughter for lunch and it was conveniently located for her between halls and campus.

She’s studying design engineering, so she’s becoming a lot more interesting to have lunch with than the average 20-year-old. As we first sat down in the serviceable brown Victorian pub that houses The Pelican, she was bending my ear about design theory. Something about how you should design an object, structure or process perfectly and then pare it back to the last point before failure, ensuring lowest cost and maximum function. I usually find conversations like this riveting, but my mind, I confess, was drifting to the structure of the building in which we sat. Massive. Over-specced. Designed unquestioningly to last an eternity and encrusted with inexplicable plaster decoration. Form can follow function all it likes, but you’ve got to love an egg-and-dart cornice.

The menu came brief and typed, with lots of short words on it, like “oysters”, “beetroot” and “Barnsley chop” and then a pleasantly large amount of white space. I imagined, initially, that this was an echo of the cool aesthetic of, say, St John or Hereford Rd, but I discovered it was more functional than that when the waitress arrived and wrote the daily specials on to the blank space. It was lovely. A little service “extra”. Unnecessary, really, when the whole thing was written on to a mirror on the wall opposite, but a phenomenal opportunity to talk about the food and get enthused by contact.

I mean this as a compliment, but there was nothing new about the menu. Every dish was a trusted favourite of the modern British canon, and they weren’t trying to bring anything up to the moment with twists, tricks or other surprises. They just send someone out to tell you how utterly bloody lovely it all is. Simple, elegant and effective.

The langoustines, our waitress said, had just been “shown the grill” and she wasn’t kidding. About 95 per cent of the flavour happens when the chitin in the shell gets scorched. The smell of a charcoal grill on a Hebridean beach. What’s inside is sashimi with a pleasant sweetness. You can only do it with the best, most expensive langos and, even then, you need to be careful, skilled and confident enough to keep things simple. They succeeded.

Mince on toast has become fashionable. It’s a retro relic that can never match what my mum used to make us, wherein the cheap stuff the butcher minced from his scraps was revivified with Bovril. Here, the waitress explained, they buy a cow every fortnight, serve the big bits and then cook down the minced trim with a strong demi-glace they’ve made with the bones. They don’t “have” to do this (my mum could teach them a few shortcuts) but the result is sublime. It has a kind of conceptual heft to it.

It’s the distillation of a process that starts with a whole animal, and a bunch of talented, caring people. All of that — ingredients, labour, time, care, integrity — on toast.

There aren’t enough butterhead lettuces any more. Big, blowsy, open lettuces don’t pack well and don’t survive on supermarket shelves, but they embody an English summer picnic. The soft leaves need nothing more than a good vinaigrette made with English mustard. Here they take the lettuce apart and then reassemble it in a wide, flat bowl, looking like a giant blown peony, and drizzle a phosphorescent unction over it. I think it might be the single best seduction food I’ve ever come across. You have to go in with your hands, folding each leaf into a neat package and posting it past your lips. What is it with these guys? Everything has some kind of extra spin, a final polish that makes it glow.

The onglet comes with peppercorn sauce, which would be textbook were it not for the unusually pungent peppercorns they’ve chosen, and that properly rendered demi-glace. The lemon sole with brown butter would be entirely standard-operating-procedure were it not grilled on a thin metal plate, so the subtly fatty white skin on the underside of the fish is crisped and browned too. Triple-cooked chips are now quotidian, unless they come with aioli freshly made with roasted garlic.

Two days before our lunch, I’d eaten in a high-street chain restaurant, and it had been one of the most soul-draining experiences of my life. Nothing individually bad. Nothing you could report back on as awful. But I realised as I sat there, sucking down mediocre broth, that every component had been expertly pared back like some efficient modern design. The ingredients, the service, the room. All calculated to microscopic tolerances so as not to drive off a customer of low-to-average discernment. A design imperative to protect profit, with any aim to delight entirely subordinate. I know these are tough times, but I felt like Winston Smith at the end of 1984. Worn down, broken by the grinding crappiness. The awful inevitability of it. All hope dead. I felt as he did, like weeping into my grey meal.

So it would seem that The Pelican is appallingly designed, by my daughter’s standards. They build everything better than they strictly need to. There are modest “decorations” to dishes, and there is no apparent rationale beyond the creation of happiness. They could have designed the restaurant experience to be just sufficiently non-crap that customers don’t stay away. Instead, they’ve made it so good that people like me can’t forget them, and will willingly return, again and again. Thank God The Pelican has got it so wrong.

Follow Tim on Twitter @TimHayward and email him at tim.hayward@ft.com

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