Grace and flavour: L’entrepôt

Winter draws on, which pleases me greatly. Hot-water bottles, Middlemarch on Netflix, Just-Eat.co.uk delivering yaki udon, the right to wear real dresses with sleeves and ‘The Power of Love’ by Frankie Goes To Hollywood honking through Oxford Street department stores. Winter lovers, you can sit with me. Crack open a bottle of Malbec, change into pyjamas at 7pm; the pressure to spend Sunday titting about with a Frisbee is over once more.

Speaking of wine, I had lunch at L’entrepôt in Hackney this week; a sort of wine bar/wine merchant/bistro/enormo brunch space about ten minutes’ walk from Hackney Central Overground, close to The Amersham Arms, a unique establishment where all genres of human life can be found. L’entrepôt serves a tiny selection of dishes. When we visited on Sunday there was an excellent-looking kedgeree, lamb with mash and garlic, different eggy breakfasts, a mishmash of needs and priorities. The place hasn’t quite worked out what it is and after two hours I hadn’t either, but I know they needed the radiators on.

Having lunch in a wine merchant’s — for this is a sibling of Borough Wines — can be a perilous affair, particularly on a grey, drizzly day, as sometime after the first glass of Beaumirail Vacqueyras 2010 one will think it an enormously cost-saving and common-sense notion to buy a dozen bottles of this wine. ‘Why,’ one might muse, ‘imagine the shoe leather and environmental carbony noggins I’m saving by buying a massive amount of red wine! I’m not merely sensible, but noble, too. I shall sip it slowly over the year.’ Cut to two weeks later and you’ll be sat on the glory-free zone that is your sofa, opening the final bottle, shouting at Question Time with purple tramp’s teeth.

As it turned out at L’entrepôt, no one gave a damn whether we bought wine or not. There was no hard sell. Or soft sell. Or Soft Cell for that matter — instead the piped music was that awful freeform jazz, the stuff that Carrie in Homeland loves and which makes her so chilled out and reasonable.

I tried to reserve a table before arriving and was told ‘no reservations’. Then I arrived and it was deserted. But I’m not a scientist so I can’t prove the connection between having a restaurant in the middle of nowhere, not guaranteeing that anyone can get a table and it being empty on a freezing Sunday afternoon.

We ordered lamb, which was glorious and delicious, floating on a bed of velvety, pacifying garlic mash with whole cloves of mushy slow-roasted garlic strewn across it. God bless the chef, working away in his open kitchen, creating these wonders with so much pride and passion, before clanking his bell for service — again, then again, while the waiting staff pointlessly feng shuied chairs, checked their phones or simply stared into oblivion.

After our main courses were delivered we were so thoroughly ignored that I was forced to place the order for the sole choice of pudding — a startlingly good roast fig tarte Tatin with homemade sorbet — at the bar myself. Then I had to ask several times to pay. Readers always say to me, ‘I bet you get amazing service everywhere,’ and although I like people to imagine that I float into places in a flurry of tugged forelocks, rose petals and waitresses attempting to wash my feet with their hair, the truth is that in most places I can walk in and be the only customer, plonk myself down brandishing a neon bingo blotter in my fist and rock demonically, shouting, ‘HALLLLO! CAN HAZ REVIEW FOR YOU PLEASE!!’ and still spend 20 minutes watching the waiter warming his arse cheeks on a radiator or picking his teeth.

I paid up and left doing my very funny ‘Byeeeee! See yaa! It’s been emotional, guys’ gag, to complete staff obliviousness. L’entrepôt, I’ll cut to the chase: your food is delicious but if you want to be a bistro, then be one. Shove your radiators on and pull your finger out.