Old and new London

I couldn’t work out why I felt so at home in Bermondsey Kitchen, on Bermondsey Street, in - you guessed - Bermondsey. It’s not my neck of the woods, though about a hundred years ago I worked close by at the Financial Times, which built its new offices on Southwark Bridge (when I was there, it was pretty advanced to have air conditioning.

Now, no doubt, the building is fully interactive and each journalist exists in their own climate-controlled pod, while a robot fetches their coffee and writes their copy, too).

Speaking of robots, though, I sometimes wonder what an alien would think if he landed in Bermondsey today. He wouldn’t know what century he was in. Ancient creaking pubs with overhanging eaves nestle next door to glass-and-steel global HQs (Shell and Ernst & Young are here). Dickensian bakeries and alehouses rub elbows with hi-tech loft offices, shops selling wacky clothing (Zandra Rhodes lives here and her Fashion and Textile Museum is a hair extension away). Galleries which deal only in dreaded installations (painting is sooo last millennium) abut Victorian public housing blocks on cobbled streets.

So when it comes to the Bermondsey Kitchen, do give yourself plenty of time to wander around. You’ll find yourself peering down alleys and into estate agents’ windows and imagining, as I did, living among all these self-employed creative types who, I should imagine, do their food shopping in Borough Market and probably own ‘livework’ apartments in lovingly restored ink factories, yarn markets, or whatever.

Anyway, the Bermondsey Kitchen’s location and design encapsulates the stark contrast between old London and new London (sorry to sound like a travel brochure badly translated from Japanese, by the way) rather well.

Its wide, modernistic façade sits opposite an old church and across from a ramshackle house called The Old Rectory, which looks like a squat. But inside it’s rather swish, with the obligatory open-plan kitchen where chefs are searing sea bass and grilling meat, and waitresses are zooming around replenishing baskets of the bread which they bake on the premises (so good we ate three baskets of it, its crunchy crust and loose, chewy crumb sopping up the olive oil nicely).

The night we went, it was full of locals and thirty-something men in threes. ‘There is a big gay community here, and loads of people have moved into the area in the past few years,’ explained the owner, Dela. ‘Zandra Rhodes comes in and we had Waheed Ali last week.’

Even after three bread baskets, we applied ourselves energetically to our lusty starters: serrano ham with an oriental dressing on a bed of crunchy beans was good; the ham was thick-cut rather than fine-shaved, which helped as the dressing had quite a kick. And I had a wonderful soup with chunks of pink ham in it, thick with bright green fresh peas and seasoned with fresh mint, which I thought required the addition of a fourth basket.

Still hungry, I then ate a steak straight off the grill with spinach and more bread, while my husband had a pork chop which came with a sort of ‘stuffed’ rice pilao. I’m not mad about raisins so I turned my nose up when I was offered a taste, but the pork was gloriously fatty, and the slab of meat generous and juicy.

Suddenly, my stomach told me that enough was enough, and although the spirit was more than willing to embrace the hot chocolate pudding with crème fraîche, the flesh was weak. And for the first time in living memory, I could not find a little tiny space inside into which to force a pudding, which is a testament not just to my greed but also to the fact that I had eaten so well.