Eating out

The Warrington (British)

In a steep little street running east from Maida Vale, there is a boarded-up pub called Crocker’s Folly. Built by Victorian entrepreneur Frank Crocker in the 1890s, the ‘folly’ refers to an old tale that his huge gin-palace was originally intended to service the new Marylebone station.

When the location of the station was changed to its present one, a mile from his new pub, Frank Crocker was so distraught that he killed himself.

It is a deeply poignant story that – rather inconveniently – turns out to be completely untrue. The only tragedy is that such a splendid old building should have remained empty and unloved for the last few years, although there are rumours it will soon be a Lebanese restaurant.

Another, more modern, story has über-chef Gordon Ramsay sitting in the bar of the nearby Warrington Hotel, contemplating the purchase of Crocker’s Folly to augment his small-but-burgeoning empire of gastropubs. Casting his gaze around the Warrington’s wonderfully ornate interior, he had a ‘let’s-put-on-the-show-right-here-in-the-barn’ moment, and decided to buy the Warrington instead. Or so the story goes.

I dropped in for lunch on a quiet, post-Bank Holiday Tuesday and found the spruced-up interior in all its Rococo glory, untypically unencumbered with customers. Ramsay has done the old place proud, its heady blend of art nouveau, marble, mahogany, stained glass and cherubs all scrubbed-up and smiling.

The ground floor is still a ‘proper pub’, serving a bar menu, a sensible range of bitters, and an excellent guest beer: Hurley’s porter, a rich, bittersweet, dark brown ale, a pint of which I took upstairs to the restaurant.

The menu ticks the right boxes: pies, pints of prawns, oysters, salads, soups and nursery puddings. Name-checking is rife, in a fashionable litany of provenance: Goosnargh for duck, the Severn and Wye smokery for salmon and eel, Montgomery for cheddar, Sharpham for spelt.

I started with potted duck, served (in what is rapidly becoming a faux-rustic cliché) in a Kilner-type jar, and sourdough toast. Silky and gently spiced, it was irreproachable.

Choucroute garnie was equally impressive (served in a twee little casserole this time): all the proper meats and sausages were present and correct, the cabbage with just the right bracing sourness to offset their fattiness. The kitchen rustled up some top-notch Dijon mustard when I asked for it, and the waitress fetched me another pint of beer. I could have been in Alsace, had the portion been three times as big.

Pudding was a treacle tart whose filling seemed to have been only briefly acquainted with its pastry. I decided to introduce them both to a small mound of clotted cream, and we all got on very well.

The Warrington may well be a formula – the menus in Ramsay’s two other pubs run along similar lines – but it is a formula that pleases. Good, seasonal British ingredients, a smattering of French technique, a highly competent chef, and reasonable prices. Anything else would be pure folly. Bill Knott 

Lunch or dinner for two, with wine, around £90 (cheaper with beer).
The Warrington, 93 Warrington Crescent, Maida Vale, W9 1EH
020 7592 7960