AA Gill's Review of Sam's

"This week’s restaurant is in Chiswick, or Cheltenham, as I used to know it. Sam’s Brasserie can be accessed up Barley Mow Passage. A barley mow, by the way, is a stook. Interestingly, the three English meanings of mow all have unconnected origins; mow as in heap of hay is from the Old Norse; mow as in mow a meadow is from the Latin for reap; mow, an archaic word for pulling a face, comes from moe, the old French for pout. I wouldn’t have known any of that before I was merely stupid.

Calling a restaurant Sam’s is a hostage to Hollywood. I assume it is owned by someone called Sam. This being Chiswick, it is probably a Samuel or a Samantha. But vanity shouldn’t blind you to considering the staff. I mean, how many times do you think you’d be able to go up to a table and say “What’ll you have?”, and have half a dozen Boden-clad homeboys with matching Putney High hos shout back “We’ll always have Paris” before you went berserk with a meat axe?

The room looks as if it was some sort of warehouse, the kind of place a dyslexic pimp might have worked. It is now split into a bar, restaurant, mezzanine and open-plan kitchen — all postindustrial and exposed in a kitschly 1980s, flying-ducts-up-the-wall way. The menu, which is written on your place mat, is long on wine, but rather forgetful on food. This is the way people in Chiswick like it. This corner of west London is populated by pretty ordinary, normal, decent people: 90% of them teach media studies, the other 12% are commissioning editors for Channel 4. They just have one teensy collective dirty secret: they’re all honking dipsomaniacs. There are Southern Comfort bottles hidden behind every hedge in Chiswick. Everyone looks perfectly nice, but in any room, 40% of them will have wet themselves.

The food is safely pedestrian, with odd moments of quirkiness, which is presumably drunken revelry. I started with a crackling salad: cold pigskin with slices of grainy dry apple and some suppository radishes. I wish I could make this sound better, almost as much as I wish they’d made it taste better. The Blonde’s yellow soup was indeed much better.

After that, I had diver-caught plaice. I asked the waiter, a charming, attentive, not to mention gorgeous boy, who I expect was filling in time before becoming Demi Moore’s next husband, what exactly a diver-caught plaice was. He said they had a man who harpooned them. I looked incredulous. He looked convincing. “No, really. They come with holes in them.” So do bottoms. What arrived was a tranche of a very big fish covered in little brown shrimps and a mild garam masala sauce, prepared within a millimetre of perfection. It was a very good dish.

Pudding was some nice chocolate cake and excellent strawberries that, unusually, tasted of strawberry and not just the water somebody had washed plums in. Apparently, they are new fraises des bois crossed with steroids.

What’s most impressive about Sam’s is the sourcing of some extremely good ingredients, from the bread to the waiter. If I lived in Chelmsford, I’d be jolly pleased to have it as my local. Though if I lived in Chiswick, I’d be too legless to give a sot."

A A Gill - Sunday Times 25th September 2005

September 30, 2005