The Coach, 26-28 Ray Street, London EC1R 3DJ (020 3954 1595). Meal for two including drinks and service £90.
It doesn’t matter how much titivation and knocking through they do to an old boozer to turn it gastro. If once you knew where the bogs were, you always know. The toilets never move. I could find my way to the facilities at the Coach and Horses in London’s Farringdon with my eyes shut and a few years back I basically did, many times. There’s a reason they call it “blind drunk”.
Now renamed the Coach, the pub sits in a hollow between the Clerkenwell and Farringdon Roads which, according to legend, was the place for bear baiting in Victorian London. Apparently, the bears were kept in the cellar until the landlord slipped on his ladder and rightly became lunch. I knew the Coach in a more debauched era, for it was behind what was the headquarters of the Guardian and the Observer. It was our pub.
The landlord, Brian, would cash our cheques – such nostalgia – without a card. He knew our home addresses so we could be poured into a cab at the end of the night. The boss classes would regularly call down to the Coach looking for an errant reporter as deadline approached. The bar staff knew how to pick up the phone as you arrived to buy a pint, read your face and tell the caller that no, they hadn’t seen you. We celebrated promotions in there, and the end of the week, and the fact we’d got through, say, Wednesday without incident. It was very utilitarian, the Coach. Those toilets stank.
We left that building almost 10 years ago. We had no reason to stay, because the old boozer had been stripped and sanded and had started serving food which by all accounts was rather edible. Twiglets were not good enough for the new clientele, apparently. A number of colleagues blamed this on me, because I banged on about nice cooking and pleasing gastro pubs. It was only a matter of time before my filthy bourgeois contagion reached the Coach. Out of twisted solidarity, even I didn’t go in there again.
Then a few months ago it reopened under the care and supervision of the chef Henry Harris, who has been brought on board to revive this and both the Hero of Maida (formerly the Truscott Arms in Maida Vale) and the Three Cranes, deeper into the City. I’d refer to Harris as the “veteran” chef, but he’d probably set fire to my hair. It is my way of admitting we are friends. I fell for his cooking first. When we met he had just finished a less than happy period at some pan-Asian lounge and was about to open Racine in Knightsbridge. I asked him what the plan was. He said: “to never cook with lemongrass ever again”.
He kept his word. Racine became the place for people besotted with the eternal verities of French bistro cooking: for calves’ brains in black butter and rabbit in mustard sauce and Wiener Holstein and a perfectly made Mont Blanc, with crisp and chewy meringue and a chestnut purée like velvet. A few years ago, Harris closed Racine. He said the neighbourhood it had been designed to serve was now a desert of empty properties bought for investment. A portion of London, the lard-arsed portion, mourned. Harris’s reappearance overseeing these pubs was taken as a cause for celebration.
So I’m declaring an interest. Just know that if I couldn’t have been positive, I wouldn’t have reviewed. If this troubles you, stop reading now. Another review will be along next week. The menu at the Coach is like greeting a much-missed old friend. This is not food that pushes at boundaries; it is very happy keeping to its own agenda. There is now a glass-ceilinged extension and a patio out back which, on a warm day, is filled with middle-aged men eating together. For a particular sort of bloke, Harris’s French classics are like nursery food, a list of things that says everything will be fine.
Those calves’ brains are listed, though today haven’t yet arrived from France. I regard it only as a reason to return. Instead, I have steak tartare which, rather than being compressed into a dense, puckered cylinder, is a loose mound of mustardy loveliness, cut through with capers and cornichon. The toast is thick cut and warm. A skate terrine with a basil and tomato sauce is a plateful designed for an early summer’s day, the block of sweet, mellow white fish breaking apart easily for a ride through the sweet-sour herb dressing.
I have the grilled rabbit with planks of crisp, smoked bacon and a thick mustard sauce because it’s been a while since we hung out together. It’s not a complicated plate of food, but it is extremely satisfying. Duck confit comes with a bacon sauce and pommes sarladaise, the potatoes sliced, pressed, baked, then cut into squares and deep fried because that makes most things better. Prices are London familiar: about £8 for starters, mid-teens for mains, £80 gets you a whacking côte de boeuf for two with chips, salad and peppercorn sauce.
For dessert there are the likes of crème caramel or chocolate and almond torte. Instead, we share an apple and ginger crumble which, encouragingly, comes with both ice cream and custard, because why should we be forced to choose? In the interests of balance, it should be recorded that this was listed as an apple and ginger crumble, but of ginger nothing could be detected. For God’s sake, Harris, get your act together.
The wine list is a robust, French-heavy collection, starting at less than £20 a bottle – greetings PicPoul de Pinet; why hello Sancerre – and priced to enable the losing of a night without losing your home. It should also be said that, before you get to the atrium and the patio, and the metrosexual men with their Gallic comfort food, this is still a pub, serving the product of breweries like Timothy Taylor, Thornbridge, Portobello and Stiegl.
And even on this warm day there are a few chaps here, nursing a pint. Listen very carefully and I swear you can hear the ghosts of my colleagues at their shoulder, whispering gently: just have another; stay a while; of course you’ll get your copy in on time because you always do. The new Coach is a very different place to the one I knew. It’s changed in so many ways. But it’s also very welcome.
News bites
For pub food with an Anglo-French accent, head to the Cartford Inn at Little Eccleston in Lancashire. Amid the starters, a classic French onion soup sits comfortably next to black pudding doughnuts. Dishes from the ‘Pub Classics’ menu include an oxtail and beef skirt suet pudding and a fish pie, but they’ll also do you a côte de boeuf or a fruits de mer (thecartfordinn.co.uk).
My latest piggy crush: dry-cure bacon from Cure and Simple, a small outfit bringing a nerdy approach to the serious business of the rasher, and then dispatching it via a subscription service for £4.95 a pack. My favourite is the oak-smoked pancetta-style back bacon… It’s why the bacon sandwich was invented (cureandsimple.com).
Congrats to restaurant crowdfunding king Gary Usher, the chef behind Sticky Walnut and Burnt Truffle in the north-west. He recently announced the crowdfunding round for his fifth restaurant, Pinion in Prescot, Merseyside, would be limited to one day. The target was £50,000. He raised it in one hour.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1