Simon’s Blog: Pedigree Chum
Cockle croquettes at The Shed, Swansea
How quickly time passes. A few weeks ago Maryann and I went to London for an awards ceremony at which Cegin y Bobl - the not for profit that I help out with - was nominated. We don’t get up that way very often these days and it’s an opportunity to do a little eating out. In the past I suppose my habit, harking back to the days when it was literally my job to eat out, was to try somewhere new. Maybe it’s a function of age, limited opportunity or hanging on to familiar comforts in uncertain times but increasingly I find myself returning to places I’ve known and loved for many years. Quality Chop House comes to mind as does Quality Wines, its much younger sibling which operates next door. Fergus Henderson and Trevor Gulliver’s St John still stands above all others with a devotion I’ll return to shortly. Then there are restaurants I still think of as newcomers like 40 Maltby Street or Brat which are nothing of the sort. Back when I was eating at these places and getting paid for my opinion on them it was all about the next big thing, something different, something groundbreaking. For me the novelty of novelty wore off some time ago.
For this lunch we headed back to a tiny venue with a place in Soho history that extends well beyond the food served in the upstairs dining room. It might take me a thousand words to give you any sense of the soul of the the French House in Dean St so I’ll just offer their own description of the place as bait to dig deeper into the history if you don’t already know it.
“Actors, writers, artists and wits rub shoulders with royalty, bohemians and the film world in this, the most iconic of Soho watering holes. A fabulous and entertaining spot to raise a glass in London, the French House truly deserves its reputation as the best known pub in the world's naughtiest square mile.”
A Pub, Not a Museum
I first visited the French House Dining Room that sits above the pub in around 1998. As I recall I sat alone in the small room among the photographs and illustrations of those notorious denizens remarked upon above. It was not a museum then though and it is not one now. I’m reminded of the plaque formerly displayed on the door to the bar of Brown’s Hotel in Laugharne, another drinking den where a Dickensian cast of characters, swilled in a ferment of ale, hard liquor, smoke, bawdy wit in the middle to late decades of the last century. Something along the lines of “This is a pub not a museum”. I have no knowledge of whether Dylan Thomas was a customer of the French House as well as Brown’s and I’m not about to ruin that narrative by looking it up. What I do know is that these places have their own poetry which the artists with whom they are associated may have succeeded in distilling but did not create. We need look no further than Under Milk Wood before resting that case.
That day in 1998 I ate lambs tongue in a broth with barley and a family resemblance to cawl. It was cooked by Margot Henderson and the fact that I remember it so well is significant, in that I can recall surprisingly few of the several thousand meals I was paid to eat whilst in the employ of the AA Restaurant Guide. That could be down to it being my very first solo visit in the job or perhaps the French House’s magnetic romanticism and air of non-conformity and rabble rousing for which I’ve always been a sucker. I don’t think so though; in the next few years I’d eat at the tables of the most celebrated chefs in the UK and some of those abroad too - Marco Pierre White, Gordon Ramsay who I’d later work with on Kitchen Nightmares, Raymond Blanc, the brother’s Roux, the young, brilliant and beautiful Heston Blumenthal, many more. There was a lot of excitement in the air, chefs were becoming celebs, a lot of places were opening. Marco was like Elvis for a while, there was him and then there was everybody else. There were fallouts, rivalries, dirty tricks and jealousies. Michelin Stars were an even bigger deal than they are puffed up to be now. It was fast, sometimes thrilling and impossible not to get caught up in if you were editing one of the major restaurant guides and by 2000 I was in that job. The AA Restaurant Guide - a feeble effort now - was at least vaguely useful at the time and whilst being very much the BAFTAs to the Michelin Oscars, it mattered a lot more to some chefs than it did to the public, this was how they measured their success.
Food with Soul
Looking back I was somewhat dazzled by all this for a while but the longer it went on the more I began to feel that what was going on in some of these kitchens and appearing on the plate was increasingly designed to impress rather than satisfy. All fur coat and no foundation garments, and it seemed to me that the truly great cooking was going on in different dimension altogether, one occupied by the likes of Alistair Little, Shaun Hill, Rowley Leigh, Mark Hix, Simon Hopkinson, Franco Taruschio at the Walnut Tree, Sam and Sam Clark at Moro, Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers at River Cafe, Joyce Molyneaux, Giorgio Locatelli, Stephen Terry, the Galvin brothers and probably at least two dozen more. Food with soul, food that for all it’s craft and care was not so far away from the repertoire of my Grandmothers, both of whom had been in domestic service. Food like that lambs tongue of Margot Henderson at The French House and her spouse Fergus at St John. Simple and built on the foundations of the people’s cuisine, necessity whipped up into deliciousness and delivered into the joy of family, friends and generosity to strangers. “Let me get you something to eat” was part of the greeting for anyone who entered their homes, the kettle would already be on.
It’s enlightening to look back at the restaurant hysteria of the 90’s and early 2000’s and survey what remains. The important legacy is not that of the biggest names of the time but that incomplete list above. St John is still there, as is Moro. Shaun Hill is still in the kitchen, having taken on the Walnut Tree a couple of decades ago. At the French House Dining Room, Neil Borthwick’s brilliant cooking is more than equal to the iconic status of the room and perfectly pitched to its spirit. It’s this part of the restaurant family tree that is still flourishing. You can detect the influence and spirit of this cooking in great places to eat across the country and in our homes too. All across the UK there are brilliant restaurants that simply wouldn’t exist without their chefs and patrons having plied their trade and been marinated in the culture of those great kitchens.
In our locality I always think of the great Scott Davis in this regard. After years in London, Scott runs the supremely good catering company Strawberry Shortcake these days with his wife Kirsty. Every know and then he pops-up here at Wright’s for a guest night and he has that innate understanding of flavour and texture that after all these years in the business still startles me. Stephen Terry has it too, second nature, and for the last 18 months we’ve been blessed with The Shed in Swansea where local hero Jonathan Woolway and his Head Chef Josh John ply their trade in SA1.
The Spirit of St John with a Welsh DNA
Back in the summer of 2023 I took a couple of days out on a road trip with the last pair to introduce them to a few local suppliers ahead of opening the new joint. I’d known Jonathan for a while - he had risen to the role of Chef Director at St John almost surreptitiously, at least that’s how it seemed to me when I first heard that there was this character from Swansea at the helm of this most beloved of dining places. Over the years I’d come to realise that any time spent in his company was a gift and he’d been kind enough to accommodate a few of our cooks whenever we wanted to help them understand the values we work to at Wright’s. He cooked with us too and we did a little radio together. Every now and then I’d tentatively enquire as to how much he must be missing Swansea City home games and gauging the chances of a homecoming . That hope eventually became a reality and short of actually being in Llanarthne, the route from here to The Shed is relatively short, painless and in our case already well worn.
If any of what I’ve said above makes sense to you then you may well have already been and shared in the good fortune. If you haven’t then you have that pleasure in front of you. All these years in food have taught me that heritage matters. In our kitchen Maryann and her sister Charlotte continue the work of their mother Jenny who channelled the writings of Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson and the influence of auberges into a flourishing Welsh farmhouse restaurant back at the end of the 80’s. The honesty and integrity of Jonathan’s cooking is shot through with the spirit of St John and the majestic Fergus Henderson. It’s not a copy, its DNA is entwined with that of his Swansea and Welsh roots - witness the genius of the cockle croquets, rissoles, faggots. There’s now a steal of a lunch menu on offer too. See you there.
Simon Wright, 24th June 2025