Review at a glance: ★★★★☆
This is an era of display model restaurants. London is busy with them, these ornamental show ponies dressed in all the right fixtures and fittings, that draw their intended crowds and serve them plates of nothing soon praised as everything. They are role-play restaurants, for pretend people living artificial lives. It can be wearing, going to these places, wondering in the half light if no one else notices the smoke and mirrors, the make-up, the rehearsed gags. The only comfort is that they will be gone in a year or two, as the fame-starved spotlight searches on, and on, and on.
In his cursed, unutterably titled play — the one that gave this pub its name — Shakespeare put it another way: fair is foul and foul is fair. Pithy bastard. It fits neatly for this modest renovation of a nothing pub most famous for a spineless attack on the landlord by Blake Fielder-Civil, then Amy Winehouse’s fedora’d husband. Those were the grim years, when the place was known for the landfill indie bands that passed through with hopes of NME approval. It looks different now: they have scrubbed away the scum and scuzz, put in a new bar and kitchen, slapped up some crimson panelling, hung a few handkerchief lampshades. But there are still the old tiles, showing the Scottish king witless at the sight of Banquo’s bloodied ghost. Without a doubt it has been done over, but if you were ignorant of its years patrolled by the MySpace paparazzi, you might think it’s always been like this. Showing off has been side-stepped.
It adheres, then, to its bones as a pub. Drinks do especially: lager for £4.95 a pint, wine for six quid. I’ll think I’ll move in. Murphy’s on draft; cocktails kept strictly to the essentials (no martini, but then asking for one in a pub should come with a whole life order). Here is somewhere wanting guests to wonder about what to order, not worry about the bill. Lo and behold, people linger and top up their order. You may well spend as much in this room as anywhere else, but it feels better doing it here.
In charge is Jamie Allan, who made his name with Ed McIlroy under the banner Four Legs. The duo found fame with the Plimsoll and Tollington’s, but now Allan has hokey-cokeyed both his pins out of the partnership and here is going it alone, though has Patrick Nolan on hand front of house. Banquo and co on the wall have had no bearing on the menu; this place is Portuguese, or what I’d call seaside European.
What to order? One of everything. Olives so big they look like they’re blowing their cheeks out will arrive slick with oil beside happily straightforward garlic bread — just slices of poppy seed baguette green with garlic butter — and paving slabs of comté alongside a rubble of almonds. Two enormous fried eggs were laid over a plate like a crisp linen sheet, their bases fried to a demerara brown; on top hunks of trout soft enough they were mistaken for fruit, and under perfect shoestring fries, a play of a kind on bacalhau à brás. Our table of four squabbled with greed. Pork escalope arrived not flat like a palm but as brawny as a forearm, crunching breadcrumbs wrapping tender meat. Over it flowed a waterfall of leeks and green peppers that pooled in the plate.
Pork escalope arrived not flat like a palm but as brawny as a forearm
More arrived and was gratefully demolished. Octopus enlivened with the heat of horseradish and the acid of tomato; a bifana full with rightly fatty pork; lamb samosas (chamuças if you’re holidaying out there) with a plum chutney, a clever dish that eschewed sweetness in favour of richness, made bright with squirts of lime. Black pudding, always a hit. Only rabbit with piri piri sauce left us indifferent; by no means bad, just a little boring.
Plates stuck around; even as new dishes arrived, we kept idly grazing on what had come before. Drinks appeared, then more. On we chatted, and chatted, till we left happy and full and not a little drunk, thinking what a perfect night it had been. This is somewhere doing only its thing: no play-acting, no plot to keep up with. “Out, out, brief candle,” says Macbeth, “life’s but a walking shadow.” Our time is fleeting and perhaps pointless. Maybe so. But it’s made better in places like this.
Meal for two about £100. 70 Hoxton Street, N1 6LP; the-macbeth.co.uk
