serinde

The only other planned meal of our trip was at St JOHN, a fabulous place which was ground zero for the nose-to-tail eating revival. I'd been there before a couple of times; S. had not, so this seemed like the moment. We could only ("only") get reservations at the Marylebone branch, rather than the mothership, but this was fine. We learned that this iteration is more in the direction of "get several dishes and share them", which was fine by us. Alas they did not have my absolute favorite dish, the bone marrow and parsley salad, but so it goes.

Started with a kir apéritif, then got the first round: a deep fried Welsh rarebit - you could think of it as a rarebit croquette and not be too far off - and fried crackly pig skin; I had a glass of their house white, and S. had a glass of Bourgogne (Domaine Bruno Colin 2022) that was notably excellent. The rarebit was delicious; the pig skin was good in its way, but a) really too rich for a starter and b) would have been better warm rather than room temperature.

Next we split crispy duck leg on a bed of sliced fennel bulb with roasted shallots, all tossed with a sharp vinaigrette. St JOHN is particularly skilful at dressings, which is important when you are dealing with mountains of rich ingredients. Followed was a slab of roast Middle White[1] pork with braised parsnips, accompanied by a salad of...I'm not sure what kind of lettuce, but it was crisp and good...with another brilliant dressing including pickled walnuts. The pork was melt-in-your mouth delicious and it could make you swear off something as crude as beef forever. We had way too much food, and I couldn't do justice to the parsnips or the salad as a result. With this, we had a bottle of Bandol (2022), of which my only wish was that they'd opened it earlier rather than when the duck came out.

I was also leaving room for dessert: we split an apple crumble, which was perfect, and had a glass of Sauternes apiece. Then we slowly rolled into a cab and returned to base.

[1] a British heritage pig breed