Grace and flavour: Garnier

Off to Earls Court this week, a place I rarely go for pleasure. In fact, the last time I spent any meaningful time in SW5 was to attend a bridal show at Olympia, which was a bleak afternoon of being shoe-horned into £6K meringue frocks by daylight robbers with demi waves from Bridlington. Earls Court, so much to answer for: shortly after that I ran off to Vegas and was married in less than 20 minutes by a man with a horizontally flowing Donald Trump wig called the Reverend Duane. The only time I’d recommend Earls Court to anyone is if they were weeping after a bad break-up with an Australian and asked, ‘But where will I find another man like Shane?’ To which the answer is: ‘Um, live music night at The Troubadour?’

But I’m wrong, of course. There’s an excellent reason to go to Earls Court and that’s the gloriously elegant French restaurant Garnier, run by Eric and Didier Garnier, which I’ve discovered is about three minutes’ walk from the Underground station. Garnier is one of those spots I feel glum writing about as people will only start going there and cluttering the place with their big feet and quacky voices, when right now it’s a dreamy room of French serenity, the type of setting in which one imagines Sarkozy might have wooed Bruni, them mooning at each other over an escargot à l’ail or coquilles Saint Jacques. I have long been furious at Bruni over the fact she spent the entire 1990s with her ankles in the air strumming an acoustic guitar and still ended up First Lady of a country, so my lunch at Garnier — which may serve the best filet de boeuf au poivre this side of the Channel — made up for the discrepancy somewhat.

When I visited Garnier, the clientele comprised an older French gentleman eating fine calf’s liver and drinking Brouilly with added Gallic shrugs, the actor Kenneth Cranham and those beautifully behaved extended French families who can sit and eat lunch for three hours at a time in a relaxed manner without falling out. How do the French do this? My family can’t even get through Christmas dinner without an advance pep talk, horse-strength codeine, a strategic seating plan and pre-agreed ‘safe words’. Even then, were we en famille in Garnier, one of my lot would be sitting at Kenneth Cranham’s table by the time les fromages were offered, muttering, ‘If she brings up the fact I didn’t wear a fascinator to Sheila’s wedding one more time, I’m going home. She can stuff her sorbet au cassis.’

I’ll tell you what I tasted in Garnier, all of which was very finely and lovingly turned out and satisfyingly filling, like I’d actually had a proper grown-up lunch, not shared a plate of cod tongues wrapped in newspaper in a skyscraper, surrounded by Essex girls taking photos of the sunset, or eaten a rare burger while sat on an upturned Sunblest bread crate in a pop-up diner/disused taxi office in Neasden. I ate salade de crabe with samphire and avocado, which didn’t skimp on any of these ingredients. The warm goat’s cheese with aubergine caviar was utterly wonderful — lovelier than actual caviar, which we can all secretly agree tastes like Satan’s nose scrapings. The contrefilet minute with bone-marrow butter will never be found on a ‘healthy option’ menu, but never mind, I plan to eat a lot of salad in my retirement community (if I ever reach old age, that is, and escape being bludgeoned to death by an irate chef).

And you are a fool to visit Garnier and not order the crêpes Suzette, which arrive fresh and hot with a side of cream grated with citrus zest, before a jovial Frenchman appears and pours enough Grand Marnier over it to stun a camel and leaves you trying to eat it without destroying the pristine white tablecloth. In the spirit of entente cordiale I’ll be going back to Garnier. I may never be First Lady of my own country, but if Garnier has anything to do with it, I might annex Earls Court in the name of me and my stomach.