Grace and Flavour: Reform Social & Grill

Midweek lunch at the Reform Social & Grill. The name alone drags me in. ‘Reform’ — such a noble, purposeful word. ‘Reforming’ is a very London state of mind. It’s easy, too. I must do it ten to 15 times a year: swanning around in Sweaty Betty yoga pants, sipping that putrid Vita Coco water stuff that tastes like badger phlegm, deleting numbers from my phone with names like ‘All-night Alain’, and bribing the cleaner to tell Caitlin Moran that I’m unavailable for socialising as, sadly, I’m dead.

London reform, however, rarely ever lasts and this W1 establishment is a fine place to fling oneself off the wagon. Handy for me especially as it’s just around the corner from my accountant, so I can flee there after one of his sobering talks on fiscal responsibility, which I liven up by inwardly imagining which seat one of his other, wealthier clients (Joan Collins) sits on for her lecture and on which seat she rests her wig.

The Reform’s bar menu serves the likes of duck faggots and crispy lamb bacon with mint jelly, and a strong, enticing list of cocktails including such temptations as the Daughters of Albion, consisting of Southern Comfort and kumquat and rhubarb liqueurs. This place has a swagger I like. Reform’s restaurant offers upmarket, no-nonsense British ‘fayre’: Blythburgh pork chop, duck Scotch eggs, hanger steaks, Hertfordshire snails. It’s a bit ‘go hard or go home’ but sometimes a proper meal is what you want.

One small thing: when I went to Reform it was completely deserted. Empty. I was the only diner. Friends have since told me that Friday nights are swinging, but right now if you’re looking for somewhere ‘discreet’ to take a woman to lunch who isn’t your actual, legally own wife, then this is the place. The staff gasped as I entered, like a startled séance, with expressions that said: ‘WHO SENT YOU? ARE YOU BENIGN?’ My arrival was possibly amplified by the fact I’d come directly from a photo shoot for this column’s byline picture so was in full warpaint/enormo-haired glory, resembling a sort of tornado-bashed Nancy Dell’Olio.

I took a booth and ordered a glass of Michel Torino Brut, a rare Reform burger with Ogleshield cheese and baby cucumber, plus a side of sweetheart cabbage with chilli and sage. It’s always important, I think, to have something green and healthful on your table to jolly up the horizon as you shove rare juicy beef, dripping with cheese, in a brioche bun into your mouth.

Reform’s chips are fat, plentiful and crisp — not those bleak, spindly ‘shoestring’ affairs, the ordering of which I class as the true sign of an imbecile. The chips appeared with a small terrine of thick, Tabasco-tinged ketchup, escorted to my table by a wide-shouldered Russian youth in attractively filled trousers. By this point it struck me that letting anyone else aside from me into the Reform Grill would actually be a shame. London is rather full this summer and the conversation topics of ‘Olympics traffic’ and ‘my rained-off barbecue’ are wearing rather thin.

The skies were as dark as Beelzebub’s bumcrack while I ate, which is my weak explanation for ordering the Reform trifle. A sundae glass brimming with boozy raspberries in jelly, thick custard, clotted cream, exactly the style of trifle my grandmother made, the delicious fallow ground between a posh afternoon Tipsy Laird and a child-pleasing Bird’s Trifle.

‘Will madam be wanting anything else?’ the waiter asked. ‘Love,’ I wanted to tell him. ‘It’s 3pm on a weekday and I’m a slightly drunk woman with a half-unravelled beehive, eating trifle alone. What I need is to go home and look in the mirror and ask myself some serious questions.’ Reform Social & Grill is charming, not too costly and, right now, completely empty. I’d like to keep it that way, so keep clear, thanks, you’re not welcome.

Reform Social & Grill, Mandeville Place, W1 (020 7224 1624)