Perhaps the Goodge Street area near London’s West End has never quite broken through as a destination dining spot because it simply sounds so unromantic. “Meet me on Goodge Street,” no one has ever purred seductively, although perhaps they should. Yes, Fitzrovia sounds like a bodily crevice, but it is also a hotbed of smart, impressive places such as Monica Galetti’s Mere, Lisboeta, Akoko, Roka, Rovi and so on. Now 64 Goodge Street has entered the fold. It’s from the Woodhead Restaurant Group, which runs The Quality Chop House, Portland and Clipstone, three reassuringly brilliant places that I keep up my sleeve, marked for “dinner guest who is hard to please”. Woodhead creates earnestly thought-out restaurants with top-class chefs and diligent service. One of my happiest food memories is a lunch at Clipstone back when Merlin Labron-Johnson was chef, and The Quality Chop House, the home of mince on dripping toast and confit potatoes, never goes out of fashion.
You’d think Woodhead might call it a day after big hits such as these and preserve its magical legacy, but, instead, it has taken over a former travel agency, gutted it and re-imagined it as an elegant French bistro. Or at least a refined, compact, boutique restaurant of oak browns and bottle greens, serving scallops and lentils in beurre blanc with pommes aligot, rabbit niçoise salad and snail bonbons. There’s also squab pigeon with lyonnaise sausage and sea bass with a sauce mouclade.
We’re talking sauces of untold richness that are extremely difficult to get right: garlic, chives, butter, cream, more garlic, more butter, all wrapped around bunny wabbit, morteau sausage and escargot, which might make some Brits recoil, but at the same time, 64 Goodge Street is rather quaintly British, too. There’s no room for a bar or even a waiting area, so this is a gloriously quiet, music-free, old-school dining room that you might imagine a Helena Bonham Carter character lunching at in a Merchant Ivory period drama. The staff add to this genteel atmosphere by never breaking character throughout lunch, determinedly playing the parts of people who care whether you’re having a marvellous time.
The lack of a bar won’t stop you having a decent cocktail, though: the Myrtille 75 is a stiff snifter of gin and crémant de Bourgogne with blueberry and lemon. That’ll knock the fluff off your beret. You can also buy sherry by the glass and the house white, Austrian Grüner Veltliner, at £7 a pop; there is an extensive cellar list as well. I drank peach soda made with fresh cordial and lemon thyme syrup.
It was a Tuesday lunchtime, the restaurant had been open for only about 10 days and it was already pleasantly, convivially heaving. We began with a round of comté and black-truffle gougeres: plump, cheesy, earthy, doughnutty mouthfuls of loveliness. Then a plate of crisp radishes with a slightly anonymous cervelle de canut dip. My favourite dish might have been a starter of fresh blinis with delicious Kintyre smoked salmon and crème crue (raw, slightly sour cream). It’s such an elegant, classic dish, and I can think of few places currently serving it. The scallops with beurre blanc were outstanding and appeared on a bed of pleasingly al dente lentil. Saddle of lamb was particularly good, perhaps because it came with a vibrant sauce paloise, a bearnaise made with mint rather than tarragon. The hero dish of the menu, however, is probably the lobster vol au vent with sauce américaine – a classic French sauce of tomato, fish stock, cayenne pepper and brandy. This is not a stuffed vol au vent – the 80s party-classic pastry case plays only a cameo role at the side of the plate while the lobster flesh does all the heavy lifting in a puddle of scented sauce and roast veg.
There were no clanging failures during this lunch. Head chef Stuart Andrew, who was at the launch of both Portland and Clipstone, has hit the ground running. This is the feel of a restaurant group confidently forging new ground, while sticking firmly to the principle that made it in the first place: finesse without pretentiousness.
Dessert was an abstemious, but very good slice of gâteau marjolaine, a chocolatey stack of meringue, ganache and hazelnut invented by Fernand Point, one of the fathers of modern French cuisine, and again something I’ve never seen served in the UK. No sticky toffee pudding here: they’re hitting you with notions of La Pyramide in Vienne until the very end. I’ll return to 64 Goodge Street repeatedly. They’ll never make that postcode sound romantic, but they’ve already won my heart.
64 Goodge Street London W1, 020-3747 6364. Open Mon-Sat, lunch noon-2.30pm, dinner 6pm-9.45pm (last orders). From about £65 a head à la carte, plus drinks & service.
Grace Dent’s new book, Comfort Eating: What We Eat When No One Is Looking, is published in October by Guardian Faber at £20. To pre-order a copy for £16, go to guardianbookshop.com
