Grace Dent reviews The Quality Chop House

When The Quality Chop House in Farringdon started cropping up on my Twitter timeline — after several anonymous years — it gave me a peculiar frisson. I ate chops and pies there very occasionally in the 1990s when it was a small, quietly deluxe media/art-world bear pit.

I was twenty-something, fresh in town, bristle-tailed and thrilled to be cramming my buttock overspill on to its unforgivingly narrow benches. I was eating there when PJ & Duncan had a hit with ‘Let’s Get Ready to Rhumble’, sans irony, the first time. I was eating there when the height of excitement was dancing to Rosie Gaines megamixes in the VIP area of Brown’s with Martine McCutcheon.

I ate at The Quality Chop House many times in the ‘Noughties’ — yuk, that word — decreasingly charmed by its quaint interior. I’d have gleefully hired a big yellow skip and gutted the place. It was a place for drab business lunches organised by someone you didn’t really want to see and were inwardly gleeful when they cancelled. If you cared about me, you’d take me to Moro.

But now suddenly in 2013, the chattering, gobbling classes began telling me that The Quality Chop House was back. New management, new chefs, new menu, bold as brass, impudently serving up good food you’d like to eat, rather than confusing puddles and froths of the chef’s ego, which is happening far too often for my liking right now.

At lunch, there are small, hearty plates of steamed cockles, charcuterie, Denham venison, smoked brisket, longhorn rump steak with bone marrow and, of course, pork chop, mash and cabbage. Dinner is a four-course take-it-or-leave-it ‘feasting menu’. For example: plates of beetroot with goat’s curd, ox liver and Cornish fish, followed by monkfish, mussels and smoked potato, then blackface lamb and swede, then meringue with lemon curd and rhubarb. I did not attempt the ‘feast’ but popped in for a small, abstemious ‘OK, guys, I’ll give you another chance after all these years, isn’t this big of me?’ lunch, and ended up eating three courses, drinking two glasses of fine Pinot Noir and needing an afternoon nap with my ankles raised, so they must be doing some things correctly.

The Quality Chop House feels precisely the same as when I left it, aside from very voluminous cushions tied on to every bench to soothe one’s derrière. Do they help? Yes. I started with a plate of battered Cornish fish served with a lovely, generous blob of peppery aïoli. I can’t think of a nicer simple plate of fish in London right now. The baked scallop with wild garlic butter and breadcrumbs, also fresh and easily demolished, arrived in its shell, shouting of its trip from the seaside. I ordered a plate of longhorn mince on dripping toast, quietly fearful that I’d made either a wonderful choice or a grim mistake — there was something about the large ladle of sublime mince arriving on a decadent slice of white toast, served on the sort of higgledy-piggledy flowery crockery my gran used, that made me come over quite peculiar. The pork chop floating on a quite orgasmic mash with a scattering of buttered spring greens was worth some attention, too. And if you want to be utterly slayed by lunch — and look at the weather for God’s sake, go on, you deserve it — have the excellent warm al dente rice pudding with a spoon of damson jam balancing atop.

The clientele was distinctly non-business and non-Instagram-addicted foodies. It felt like a mixed bunch of people who had wandered in having heard, quite possibly like me, that this place was thriving once more, squeezed their bums on to the benches, and waddled out far from disappointed.