Town & Country
In recent years, London pub sites have attracted attention from once disinterested corners of the hospitality industry. The freedom to trial multifarious concepts and expand over a multi-floored, often historic, footprint in a prohibitively expensive rental market has it’s appeals - despite a national trend of unrelenting pub closures.
The Public House Group, who have recently unveiled Fat Badger, a new restaurant above their Notting Hill pub of the same name, are one such interested party. One that aims to amend the ‘gastropub’ playbook by combining a farm-to-table approach with a strong design sensibility. Having opened The Pelican and The Hero to much acclaim in the last three years, these West London operations have sought to blur town and country. This is where The Cotswolds, home to their sister pub The Bull, and Notting Hill overlap - a metropolitan ‘country pub’ where log fires, a pared-back rustic aesthetic, top-tier produce and well-sourced beers are served to punters who prefer their shoes mud-free and their dogs portable.
With their third West London outing, this time at the intersection of Portobello Road and Golborne Road on the northern fringes of Notting Hill, PHG have stretched the growing upstairs/downstairs trend further still with three separate concerns over as many floors. On the ground floor of their hospitality lasagna, is Canteen, an Italian trattoria which has won plaudits for Jess Filbey’s River Cafe-centric menu. Helmed by their alumni but without the heady price tag of the Hammersmith mothership. In the middle layer, you’ll find the pub, which has crept into gossip columns with tales of A-list pop-ins, music royalty playing their house piano and a fabled private WhatsApp group that ensured entry pre-launch. Lastly, at the top of the pile, the new restaurant, which sits, birds nest-like, up a concealed staircase from the pub. Decked out in rough-sawn wood panelling, dried flowers and bathed in candlelight - this bijou 37-seater has the look and feel of an alpine stube or a very well-appointed treehouse.
Offering a multi-course table d’hôte style menu (£85pp), which is chosen by the chef, George Williams (also ex-River Cafe), but steered by the diner. A convivial format, so often cooed over in the retelling after trips abroad, whereby the chef asks the table what they like, or indeed dislike, to eat and the kitchen ‘curates’ a combination of courses from the produce available to them - taking the diners on a mystery set menu, of sorts. An approach that, as it turns out, works equally well on the top floor of a pub in Notting Hill as it does in an off the beaten track restaurant in rural France.
After a somewhat ordinary start with a soupçon of seasonal nettle soup, Fat Badger’s menu leaves the hedgerow behind and ramps up with alacrity. Heading out to the river and the sea beyond. Firstly, a brace of chalk stream trout-based bites, cured slithers topped with chopped green olives satisfies with salinity whilst the fatty cut of buttery seared trout belly on a toasted slice of the sweetened house loaf melds brilliantly. More technical is the lobster ‘taco’, lightly-battered lobster meat tossed in wild garlic aioli and a dousing of the house hot sauce all enveloped in a Rizla-thin celeriac ‘tortilla’ showed real flair and skill. The menu returns to the fields with a slightly unyielding sliced pigeon breast atop another square of that lovely toast which absorbs the gamey meat juices.
Then comes a pitch-perfect dish - pan-fried Orkney scallops knee-deep in a bowl of burstingly fresh peas and smoked guanciale. An oft-seen combination makes for an truly exemplary version here with the addition of a lobster ‘gravy’ and streaks of pumpkin puree. This is the big fireworks section of the menu and a platter of ruby rare Hereford beef fillet from Paddock Farm is ably accompanied by a scattering of morels, a subtle mushroom béarnaise, crispy hasselback potatoes and a bevvy of brassicas, beets and wilted leaves from Bruern Farms, the pub’s market garden near The Bull. A dish that represents the true quality of the group’s produce-led mission. This is meat, spuds and greens of the highest order.
A duo of puddings closes out a menu that flickers with brilliance and homely touches. The apple cider doughnut with apple crumble ice cream will delight those that revel in a straightforward sweet hit. Whereas the more poised brown sugar custard tart shows Beth O’Brien’s first-rate touch in the pastry section.
Joe Warwick, a fixture on London’s restaurant circuit dispenses advice from the largely French and Italian wine list and marshals the floor with aplomb, A genuine pro who could, feasibly, simultaneously perform a Heimlich manoeuvre and pour a celebratory glass of 20 year-old Tawny port whilst finishing his anecdote.
Despite the dire state of the pub industry and reservations about interlopers over-gilding the egalitarian sanctity of the London pub, Fat Badger gracefully sidesteps those duelling concerns. The price-point may not be for all, mind you a fillet steak in Mayfair could easily absorb the cost of the whole menu. It’s the holistic drive towards quality, from the interiors to the produce, that sits behind this flourishing group that will surely raise the bar industry-wide. Thereby, improving the look, feel and taste of future pubs who’ll, no doubt, seek to emulate it’s well-considered and thoughtful rededication to an abiding national institution.