'An old classic is reborn, better than she's ever been before.' TOM PARKER BOWLES is impressed by a 200-year-old London icon
First things first. The roast beef is magnificent at Simpson’s In The Strand. Thank god. A rib of Devon-reared Ruby Red, carved tableside from a gleaming trolley in the Grand Divan is culinary theatre at its most exalted. Rivulets of creamy fat run through the meat, which is gently, elegantly bovine. There’s a billowing Yorkshire pudding, proper gravy in a metal jug and the sort of crisp-shelled roast potatoes I thought you could only make at home. Horseradish is as fierce as a Pictish warrior.
Simpson’s has been roasting ribs of beef for the great and not-so-good for nearly two centuries, and has sat on this site since 1904. But by the dawn of the new millennium, she was in a bad way, a grande dame reduced to a shabby sort of penury, her silk frocks threadbare, her jewellery long pawned. So news that Jeremy King, one of the country’s finest restaurateurs, was riding to the rescue was welcome indeed.
And what a beauty she is once more. For this is a restaurant that purrs rather than roars, the restoration as painstaking as it is discreet.
Old oak panelling is carefully buffed, banquettes reclad in buttery leather and the gilding gleams once more. Service glides and conversation thrums, any excess cacophony soaked up by thick carpets. Small details are everything: the thick napkin with the tiny buttonhole, so you hang it off your shirt; the warmly flattering glow of the chandeliers and sidelights; the heft of the cutlery; the carafes of house Burgundy and Claret.
Simpson’s pie of the day: ‘these are classics, splendidly done’
The menu is both nostalgic and thoroughly à la mode. There are oysters and Russian salads, boiled ham with parsley sauce, railway mutton curry and grilled Barnsley chop, alongside pie and pudding of the day. Today is Thursday, so steak and kidney pudding it is, the suet crust ephemerally light, the filling rich, sticky and unashamedly meaty. These are classics, splendidly done.
Prawn cocktail comes in a silver goblet, with a mass of proper, comma-curled crustacea, lots of shredded lettuce and a suitably piquant Marie Rose sauce. Lustily buttered triangles of soft brown bread provide essential ballast. There’s bream, exceptionally cooked, in a brown shrimp butter, and then that mighty roast beef. For pudding, crumbles and possets and Trinity burnt cream. This is old-school eating with a thoroughly modern grin, the best of British in one of London’s most handsome rooms. An old classic is reborn. And, dare I say it, she’s better than she’s ever been before.
About £50 per head. Simpson’s In The Strand, 100 Strand, London WC2; simpsonsinthestrand.co.uk
