I ask Egon Ronay, the man who first put the rosettes
into British cooking and who has just published his 2006 guide to the best restaurants in the UK, if he’d care to have lunch, show me how he judges a restaurant, maybe teach me a thing or two. (As if I needed it! Pull the other one!) He agrees and suggests we try Rules — ‘London’s Oldest Restaurant’ which is fine by me, as I’ve never known whether it is simply a kind of top-of-therange Angus Steak House for dimwit tourists of a dim-witted, touristy nature or properly good, genuinely worth going to. He doesn’t know either. He’s had letters about Rules: some good, some not so; maybe it should be in his guide, maybe it shouldn’t. Let’s go.
Rules, which was founded in 1798 and specialises in game, oysters, pies and puddings, is at the back of Covent Garden, and is rather wonderful inside, especially if you are fed up with the sparse, blond-wood decor of most restaurants these days. The gorgeous Edwardian dining-room is a fabulous jumble of periods, styles and fashions, with heavy burgundy furniture, antlers, bits of stuffed animals, and wall-to-wall paintings of horses and fox-hunts and ships and the British countryside and stuff. There is also this enormous, bizarre oil painting — actually, it’s more a mural — of Margaret Thatcher, with the Falklands behind her, dressed warrior-style and with the most scary, whopping thighs. I am seated beneath it. Given the choice, I don’t think I would choose to dine under Margaret Thatcher’s thighs. Given the choice, I don’t think there is anything I would choose to do under Margaret Thatcher’s thighs. In short, under Margaret Thatcher’s thighs is simply not a place I would ever choose to be. But here I am. (I later discover that the artist, John Springs, also did the picture of me at the top of this page. It does not include my thighs. That’s my head.) Egon arrives. Egon first came to Britain from Budapest in the 1950s, when cooking here was done ‘without any feeling or care’, tinned fruit juice was deemed a reasonable starter, and he was once asked to share a spoon (tied on to a bit of string) when he ordered a cup of tea at the Victoria station buffet. He takes his place beneath Margaret’s thighs. Egon is small, old, dainty, tiny. I worry for him under those thighs. Those thighs could do him in like a nutcracker doing in a nut. Crr... rrrr... ack! Given the choice, it’s not how I’d want to go. But he is used to fearsome women. In the 1960s he toured the country as part of a cookery panel with Fanny Cradock. He once introduced a kindly cricket commentator, that night’s chair of the panel, to her. ‘This is so-and-so,’ said Egon. ‘Oh, fuck off,’ said Fanny. It was totally shocking. ‘The word “fuck” was not used very much then. The commentator looked at Fanny, looked at me, then said, “I’m going back.” I had to drive him to the station.’ Anyway, he does like the room. ‘It’s got a warm feeling,’ he says. He scans the menu. This is not so good. He does not like the sound of today’s special: freshwater prawn and diver scallop curry. If you are keen to say your prawns are freshwater and your scallops are dived-for, he says, you’re saying you are proud of your ingredients. But if you are proud of your ingredients — delicately flavoured shellfish, particularly — ‘why would you want to kill the flavours off in a curry? I think they are only pretending to be proud. I am beginning to get a picture.’ To start, he orders the mushroom and chestnut soup (£6.95), so I do likewise. ‘Extremely mediocre,’ he decides. Really? ‘It has absolutely no character. It doesn’t taste of mushroom and it doesn’t taste of chestnut. You can tell a lot about someone’s cooking by their soup. It has to have character, distinctive flavours. Lobster soup has to taste of lobster, otherwise what is the point of lobster soup?’ The soup is not unpleasant, but he is right. If I didn’t know what it was I wouldn’t be able to tell. Egon gives up after a few sips but he does that anyway, he says. He’s not so much an eater, more a taster. His friends, he adds, hate eating with him. ‘They say, “We can’t dine with Egon. He’ll say it’s marvellous and then won’t eat it.”’ I am not like this. If I like it, I’ll eat it all. If I don’t like it, I’ll probably eat it all. I’m so greedy I often have breakfast before I go to bed in case I oversleep in the morning. This may be why Egon is tiny and I am not. Mind you, my thighs are feeling very nice and tidy today. At last, Spectator readers, something to thank Mrs T. for!
As I plod on dutifully with the soup I note we haven’t been offered any bread. Egon summons the waitress, a rather sullen Antipodean who, he rightly points out, ‘could smile but doesn’t’. She says bread is not provided as a matter of course because it costs extra per person (£1.50) and so has to be ordered. Egon’s rage goes from around 10mph to 100mph in less than a second. ‘Absurd ... so third-rate,’ he rails. We order the bread anyway and it’s not even good bread. ‘It’s not homemade and it’s extremely bad,’ he says. ‘You charge people for bread and you don’t even go to the trouble of providing good bread?’ I do feel similarly outraged. Rules is not cheap. On average, starters are around £10 (our soup is the cheapest), main courses, including side dishes, are £25–£30, so, with pudding and wine and service, you’re not going to get away with less than £60ish a head. For that, you should get good, free bread. Good, free bread is about being hospitable. Dry, charged-for bread is not. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth, whichever way you look at it.
On to our mains. There are pies and puddings, pheasant and grouse, but Egon goes for the cod fillet with a grain mustard mash and langoustine sauce. The cod is beautiful, he says. Lovely and moist and fresh. He says he knows it is fresh because it doesn’t smell. ‘If fish smells of fish, don’t buy it,’ he advises. However, that said, they’ve done everything they can to spoil it. ‘The sauce is tasteless and the potato purée is too heavy. It’s real hodgepodge.’ I have the venison fillet with plums, pear and braised chicory. The plums and pears have been reduced to a much too sweet chutney, while the venison is good but not that good. ‘It certainly isn’t wild,’ says Egon after a taste. ‘It isn’t gamey enough.’ He asks if we might skip pudding. He doesn’t need a pudding to make up his mind. ‘At the soup stage I’d have been extremely surprised if it had turned out to be a good meal, and it hasn’t.’ It won’t get in the guide, then? ‘Ha,’ he cries. ‘No way. Out of the question. It’s nowhere near the mark.’ I think Rules probably does good business. Lots of Americans, lots of Japanese, but lots of Brits, too, although they do look like expense-account Brits. I think that if the Angus Steak House is bad produce badly cooked, then Rules is first-class produce badly cooked, which may even be worse somehow. Whatever, I did get to sit under Thatcher’s thighs. And you can’t do that just anywhere.
Rules, 35 Maiden Lane, London WC2. Tel: 020 7836 5314. Egon Ronay’s 2006 Guide to the Best Restaurants and Gastropubs in the UK, £14.99.
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