Our man in the Manor

This review was published in June 2001

The years are mellowing me. Where once I loathed Notting Hill for its pretension and bogusness, I now rather cherish it for its folkloric charm. Looking back on my vehement dislike for the area, I feel rather as a former follower of the Reverend Moon or the late David Koresh must feel when looking back on a period of blind infatuation.

Rather like being in the grip of religion, my splenetic rantings against W11 made perfect sense at the time. I am slightly ashamed to admit that now I rather wish I could afford to live in Notting Hill, where I could wander the streets impersonating Hugh Grant in a knackered corduroy jacket, bumping into cronies old and new. In fact, I find all the trustafarian theme-parking quite sweet.

There's a new reason for liking the area: a restaurant called Manor on All Saints Road. There was a time when the All Saints Road was to hard drugs what Bond Street is to international designer labels. Now it boasts what looks suspiciously like a wedding-dress shop, and Manor is the area's new 192.

The restaurant is the creation of Matthew Du Cann, scion of the political and land-owning dynasty that numbers among its members a maverick Tory MP, and a maverick author and former fashion editor of The Independent. In a manner of which his illustrious forebears would be proud, Du Cann has become a maverick restaurateur and club owner.

Du Cann started working for clothier Scott Crolla when he was a teenager. Crolla ran an eponymous shop that was to the Eighties what Voyage became to the Nineties. Via stretches as a cocktail barman, resident Englishman at classic Eighties New York clubs such as Area and Danceteria, assistant to photographer Mario Testino, waiter and model, Du Cann has ascended to the position of being one of London's more laidback nightclub and restaurant operators. The fact that he has a shaven head, a skin tone that puts one in mind of a stiff on a mortuary slab in Silent Witness, and a voice that barely rises above a scarcely audible whisper, merely adds to the mystique.

For Du Cann, Manor is what Laurence Stern might have called a Sentimental Journey. Back in the early Nineties, when the area was undergoing an identity crisis, not sure whether to shed its racy past and embrace its new identity as a smart London suburb, Du Cann opened a restaurant on the very same site, the Mas Caf?. Sunday brunch at Mas Caf? acquired a cult following among early Nineties style merchants including Oliver Peyton, Patrick Cox, Juergen Teller and Tyler Br?l?.

Now Du Cann is back where he belongs, presiding over a cute restaurant with squidgy, booth-like seating areas that recall padded cells designed by an avid reader of Wallpaper*, and a surprisingly bright but cosy downstairs bar.

The launch of Manor has obviously not been easy. Du Cann has taken the unusually bold step of issuing a press release to say that he sacked the chef on the restaurant's first day. The point of issuing such a communiqu? is faintly bewildering, not to say sad, as the chef rejoiced in the fabulous name of Skye Carigiet. However, according to Du Cann's spin doctors, 'it became apparent during the trial dinners that he was just not gelling with the brigade in the kitchen'.

Quite what tantrums and clashes of personality lurk beneath this obfuscatory euphemism can only be imagined. However, at least Skye's successor revels in a name almost as baroque: Adam von Schravendyk. It might almost be worth sacking him, too, just to see what other exotically named individual might be called in to man the kitchens.

But this is unlikely since von Schravendyk is a perfectly competent cook. A first course of air-dried tuna with a leaf salad was tangily agreeable, and my friend's seafood bourride, more a bouillabaisse if we are being pendatic, was pronounced excellent and of such proportions as to be almost a meal in itself. But her main course, a pork chop, had two too many sauces, one brown, one green, and neither terribly appetising to look at. My cod, a prime chunk of flaky white fish flesh with shellfish-and-saffron broth, was OK, although I wish I had tried the roast swordfish with Jersey Royal potatoes.

Desserts of poached pear with rice pudding, cheesecake, and cr?me br?l?e (albeit lurking under the name 'Latte alla Portuguese') for Du Cann, who joined our table, were all good. Food here is perfectly all right, if not epiphanic, and a more than competent backdrop for the primary function of Manor as a local drop-in centre for disenfranchised trustafarians.