Eat and be damned

You know that Private Eye cartoon, It's Grim Up North London? Well, I think I've just eaten in its spiritual canteen. St John Bread And Wine is the first offshoot from the long-established and highly regarded St John.

St John I like, there's real skill in the kitchen, but this diffusion line seems to me to be a magnificent example of what happens when high concept gets diluted - content be damned.

Like its parent, there's no decor (white-painted brick walls, rough, old furniture, unforgivingly bright lighting) and staff are businesslike, their white uniforms giving them the spurious air of culinary technicians. The menu (which offers timed options, from anchovy buns at breakfast to ox heart with a'oli at dinner) is scrawled on a blackboard. The shaven-headed, goateed men and unmade-up women of this burgh were lapping it up so much that even on a school night there were lengthy queues. Offal, long-out-of-favour cuts and other derided bits of animal have always been a passion of Fergus Henderson, the brains (appropriately) behind St John, and his enthusiasm is reflected here. The blackboard reads like the contents of a bin in an abattoir. Tellingly, on the night we visited, safer options - or simply duller ones, such as plain boiled potatoes accessorised by sorrel and a soft-boiled egg - had already sold out. The crossings out on the blackboard left the remaining choices, like nature, red in tooth and claw.

So I had turnip soup: thick, suffocating, stuffed with chunks of that muddy old cattle feed and topped with a seared chunk of foie gras.

That's right, foie gras. This was like a bad joke: a knowingly ironic pairing of luxury and peasant. Except it didn't work; the heavy, roughhewn soup simply demolished the delicacy of the liver.

My date had a potted pork and duck dish, similar to rillettes, only far slimier, blander and altogether less prepossessing. She protested that she was enjoying it but it was more a case of buying in to the whole schtick. When I suggested that she was judging it by context rather than deliciousness, she bridled, telling me context was everything. Not in my world, it ain't. Her slip soles, a brace of junior flat fish, were unremarkable other than for the fact they were afloat in a murky pool of their cooking liquor. But my main course, Bath chaps or pig's cheeks, was, to use an expression from my Scottish heritage, pure ginking. Breaded, semi-conical shapes, like antique chicken nuggets, they were once fairly commonplace - but then so was rickets.

This incarnation involved boiling and searing, a complicated cooking method that gave them flavour, certainly, but couldn't detract from their perfectly revolting consistency: to bite into them was to release a spurt of porky, gelatinous fat into your mouth. I'm not very squeamish, I love haggis, black pudding, andouilletes; I have eaten pigs' heart faggots, rattlesnake and scorpion but, with these blighters, I soon realised my boundaries.

Straightforward red cabbage and a bowl of raw pea-pods - an endearing idea whose appeal quickly palled after pea-pod number four - did little to mollify.

This offal-loving gig seems a particularly male tendency, a sort of test of machismo - I'm eating the ox heart and loving it, baby. The two women at the next table to us had resorted to a plate of the pea-pods and some cheese in order to buy their ticket into the hottest new place in town.

But, apart from the eponymous made-on-the-premises bread, which is truly excellent - particularly the gorgeously chewy sourdough - this is a prime example of the emperor's new gizzards.

St John Bread and Wine
94-96 Commercial Street, E1 6L2