There are two ways to enter House, one of many restaurants, bars and cafés on offer to National Theatre visitors. Squeezed on the first floor of the labyrinthine complex, one entrance is via the theatre building itself.
The other entrance is up a flight of almost invisible stairs on the building’s river side. As these are right next to another bar or restaurant, one whose name, unsurprisingly, I can’t remember as it undoubtedly also plays (no pun intended – honest!) with theatrical terms – The Terrace, Understudy, The Green Room… you get the idea – making things confusing to first time diners. Regrettably, confusion seems to be House’s main theme.
I’m all for clever names to reflect restaurant location. However, I also expect these to give at least some idea of the food or some semblance of how you will feel inside. In this respect, “House” does neither.
House, for me, conjures up images of comfort food and family favourites. Dishes such as stews, roasts, puddings and the like not the haute cuisine chef Polis Butkus is clearly offering.
Décor, if you can call it that, consists of a bar running through half the restaurant, garlanded above with what can politely be described as cheap plastic flowers. The bar is surrounded on two sides by a single row of chairs and tables pressed up against a wall with pendulum lights above each. Though not at all in keeping with either the style of furniture, the National’s listed brutalist architectural style and certainly not with the fluorescent bulbs as art on the restaurant’s river side which I was lucky enough to face, they are vital due to a lack of illumination throughout.
Art on the walls could attempt to show the restaurant wasn’t merely positioned here simply to fill space. Unfortunately, a few faded screen prints of old Shakespearian style maps of London and the Thames chosen by whoever decorated – a term I use very loosely – House fail to do the trick and merely continue to confuse.
If at this point diners hope to be given any indication of what exactly they will be eating from the menu, those illusions are shattered by the hodgepodge list of dishes driving diners down dizzying dietary destinations – Italy to Asia via Southwest England. No, I’m not exaggerating.
Even the bill is inconsistent: the average price for starters are a reasonable £9; sides are about £4 but mains are a wallet busting £20. Nor does the fixed menu, usually the cheaper option, achieve its goal: standing at £24 for two courses and £28.50 for three.
This is all a real shame because although most of the menu continues to confuse, all the food I ate was extremely good.
Although I have an adventurous palate, I was nonetheless baffled and a little overwhelmed by the menu choices, and so had difficulty deciding. Starters such as: cured mackerel and paté, grapes, treacle and fennel bread, contrasted with mains: rump cap, marmite butter, gratin and ox crumble. It all left my culinary curiosity a tad overwhelmed.
Nonetheless I dived in and began with Portland crab dumpling bisque. The bisque, though a little tepid for my taste, was excellent. A light foam of seafood in the midst of which swam four perfectly cooked jiaozi, their soft light pastry dyed black with squid ink, contrasting beautifully with the pale pink bisque and stuffed full of minced seasoned crab. Plated to perfection, this was garnished with pale crunchy parsnip crisps giving a wonderful change in texture to the lightness of the bisque and pillow like softness of the dumplings.
I decided to be more adventurous with my main, settling on the confit wild rabbit leg and loin, pasty, wild garlic and courgette purée, beans. I was intrigued. Largely as the menu gave no further detail. My waiter, who must have noticed me struggling to choose but still left me none the wiser. Would the entire dish come in a pasty? Would I be given some rabbit, a pasty filled with beans, all of this covered in puréed courgette? Who knew? My menu gave nothing away when a few words of description would have been warmly welcomed.
Once again, the food was excellent, in terms of both presentation and taste. Several slices of meat were arranged on a timbale mash of red beans, a bright green pool of wild garlic and courgette puree with a miniature bite sized pasty complete with a root vegetable and meat stuffing encased in flaky shortcrust pastry on the side.
The rabbit was slow cooked to melt in the mouth perfection, lightly seasoned with thyme, complimenting the delicately flavoured beans, subtle pasty filling, all magically marrying with the wild garlic and courgette purée. No component overpowered another. Even my side: a green salad, was exceptional. Mixed leaves with slices of dill pickle all dressed in a light but flavoursome herb vinaigrette.
With food this good and talented, imaginative cooking clearly apparent, surely a creative hub like the National could spare a writer or two to add a brief line of description to dishes on the menu? Similarly, with the talented set designers on offer here with minimum thought this place could be a real gem. Simply binning the plastic flowers and improving the art and lighting would help enormously. As would a name change.
If the National insists on theatre themed venues the food I tasted here was much more: “Dress Circle” or “Royal Box” than “House”.
Instead of wanting to give House a standing ovation, it just gave me a headache. I left bewildered as to why a venue lucky enough to benefit from the cooking of a chef as talented as Polis Butkus clearly is, has been left in the shoddy state it has and even more curious, in a semi-masochistic way, as to what exactly: mackerel, treacle, fennel and paté really would taste like…
ROBSLOGS 