The Green Man and French Horn

It was a dark and stormy night when a memory crossed me on Savile Row and I felt the ghost of summer.  Perhaps it wasn’t even actually dark: hard to imagine now.

The Green Man and French Horn (or Green Horn and French Man, as it became after a few drinks) is a tiny, incongruous place on Garrick Street. The bowed window is mullioned and the only thing that tells you it isn’t another touristy pub in the ratruns around Leicester Square is the light level.  It glows into the night; gold spilling through each portion of the window and sparkling in the headlights of the traffic in the rain.    

It does the restaurant a disservice to say it has a ‘concept’, because it really isn’t trying to be à la mode, but its food and wine are from the Loire valley.  I am a big fan of the Loire: they speak proper French there, the chateaux are beautiful and I went to Tours on my French exchange and ate pigs trotters with the local chief of police.  He was the father of my French exchange; I wasn’t in custody.  The only thing that worries me about the area are the river fish.  They all taste muddy to me, and I was hoping not to be confronted with quenelles de brochet (pike); on which French people seem inexplicably keen. Michel Roux Jnr, who is currently being beamed by satellite into my sitting room, once had the pike things on the Masterchef classic recipe test; which I thought was unfair as even the good versions don’t taste very nice. 

Luckily, as rivers are wont to do, the Loire lets out into the sea, so there were some nice fish on the menu.  We started with fresh cheese and beetroot, and leeks in vinaigrette with brown shrimp and chopped egg.  These were both light and refreshing, the cheese sharply lactic and the shrimp salty on the fresh leeks.  Brill in beurre blanc was the star; an old fashioned plating of just the fish and sauce on the plate (it reminded me of the Gavroche, not to labour the MRJnr connection), it was fantastic. The sauce was just incredible; thick with shallots and wine.  The other main course was hare with girolles and parpadelle in a deep, glossy sauce. The hare was a little dry (I’m sitting on my hands to stop moving into a terrible interlude of hairdryer puns), but again the sauce was exemplary. There are people here who know their stuff, and it was a cosy place to be on a Thursday evening, hiding from memories.