Le Café Anglais: Rachael Stirling reviews Le Café Anglais
Going out for Sunday lunch is a risky business. It is perfectly possible to cook a good roast at home. As a child, the only place we would go out for Sunday lunch was a local Italian restaurant called the Trattoo, now sadly closed, just behind Kensington High Street.
My brothers would always order the same thing: mozzarella in carozza followed by spaghetti vongole. The one time my father decided they should order something else my eldest brother took one look at the calves liver set down before him, and vomited.
I suppose you could say we Stirlings are creatures of habit, which is why I like Sundays to be predictable days of feasting at home with the Sunday papers for company and most likely The Antiques Roadshow on the telly.
But let me impart to you, oh reader, the revelation that is Le Café Anglais, purveyor of the perfect Sunday Lunch in London. Nestling modestly in the spot vacated by McDonalds on the first floor of Whiteleys, this is the creation of one Rowley Leigh, who also started the hugely successful Kensington Place, and is a regular food columnist for The Financial Times.
Seated on duck-egg blue leather banquettes, The Boy and I marvelled at the high ceilings and vast windows, and salivated at the walls of flame by the open kitchen where bird and beast are roasted on spits.
To begin, we tasted beetroot with boquerones and teriyaki mackerel with pickled cucumber salad. Both proved to be sweet and sour pieces of total joy. My first course of pumpkin and goats cheese soup was lush, as was The Boy's fish soup with croutons and gruyere — cleverly kept separate and added by the customer at the table, thereby avoiding the soggy specimen I have come to expect.
My main course of breast of pheasant I adored, while The Boy's partridge with frankfurter (don't diss it til you've tried it) was bloody marvellous. Queen of puddings crowned our feast and we were the last people to roll out of the place, at about six o'clock. Truly. I didn't want to leave.
Maybe they put something in the water, because all I can tell you is that everyone — customers, waiting staff, cloakroom, wine waiter, toute personne — were very merry indeed. And the cherry on top of the place is that on Sundays they have a magician. This is no cheesy table-hopping Ali Bongo. This is a cool operator who enchants even the rowdiest of little ketchup-flinging nose-picking Sunday lunch spoilers. I'm talking about kids, in case you didn't know.
This is the genius of Le Café Anglais: a place that manages to be both stylish and family friendly, a menu that offers fine dining and comfort food, and a staff that number maître d's and magicians among their happy band. I urge you, oh reader, to follow the pied piper that is Rowley Leigh, to this Whiteley wonderland.
