Ducksoup

I used to live with lots of blonde girls in a house with a pink door, which sounds a bit like Barbie but really could not have been less child friendly. One of them recently got engaged (hooray!) and couldn't join us for supper because she was having a ring fitting (boooooo, but, also, still hooray!), so the remaining blondes and I resolved to have a relatively quiet evening, a plan which went about as well as that type of plan used to go when we all lived together.

Ducksoup is one of those narrow Soho corridors where you eat at the bar and there's a terrible draught at one end from the door. They've recently opened up downstairs, which has tables you can book. I continue to find the no booking thing a hassle because, ultimately, I don't want to queue for a £40 a head supper.  You end up doing bizarre things like spending three hours in a campari bar beforehand, rendering you incapable of tasting your much anticipated hirata bun, or actually being able to use your artisan meat cleaver.  The only option to avoid the queue is to eat at 5.30pm, which I haven't done
since I was six. Chances are you'll actually be eating some form of macaroni cheese too, which only adds to the children's tea time vibe.

I love almost everything else going on right now: handwritten menus, sharing, cramped tables, bio wines, places only serving one thing (I know a lot of it is annoying and derivative but it hit me at the right age, much like Sister Number 4 and Harry Potter- hence the presence of a Hogwarts goblet in my glass cupboard) but I want to be able to book a table to try out your concept.  I think the reason everyone hates bloggers is because they're always drunk before they get to eat, so can't remember anything properly.

Ducksoup's (handwritten) menu changes every day so, whilst you could go to their website and play the fun game of trying to figure out exactly which evening I went (please, don't write in), you won't eat
what we did.  The main thing I noticed was that there are no sauces; not in a Puritanical way, more in a 'things tasted of themselves' way. Everything was very natural and fresh. For example, raw Jerusalem artichoke is exactly the same as a green apple in terms of texture, which was news to me.  We had small plates of mozzarella, kale and chilli, the aforementioned shaved Jerusalem artichokes with herbs and salted anchovies, blistered aubergines, lentils, garlic yoghurt and sumac, blood orange, pink radiccio and salted ricotta salad and a whole chargrilled mackerel with guanciale, which were all polished off
quite happily as the three of us toasted the fourth with something white from Chile (wine knowledge TBC) and gossiped into the Soho night.