Review at a glance: ★★★★☆
Gastropub? Forget it. Fitzrovia’s Newman Arms is decidedly, gloriously, a proper pub. Not a boozer — there are no watery-eyed old men, no ancient Axminster — but certainly not a restaurant. It’s been just about everything else in its time, though: from 1730, a tallow chandler, an ironmonger, a picture framer. A brothel, once, too. All that stopped in 1860 — though a cheeky shag in the loos may have happened since — when it became an inn that Dylan Thomas and George Orwell later drank in. The history isn’t much played on, though a tribute to an old landlord is still there: “Joe Jenkins, ex-proprietor, poet, bon viveur and Old Git, regularly swore at everybody on these premises.”
In 2018, Truman’s Brewery did it up appallingly with white tiles everywhere, the kind that should be kept to Tube stations and bathrooms in rental flats. New owners have now taken over, William St John and Callum Murphy. They are busy boys, with three other pubs on the go and more to come. They did a bit of a number on the Freemasons Arms in Covent Garden, now the bland Bull & Egret, but wisely on this occasion decided not to rip the soul out of the place. The appealing bones of the Newman Arms remain, but they have added handsome terracotta flooring, lots of dark stain panelling, litres of postbox red paint. There are candles, silver tankards, old posters. The cutlery is heavy and ornate; the wine glasses have thick stems, like those in your parents’ sideboard. It has personality.
Pies and pints is the sell here, which about covers it all. There is a snug in the basement and a bar on the ground floor for pints — Murphy’s or Pillars — and pies in the compact dining room upstairs. Tables are close together, dressed in white tablecloths and strange water glasses the colour of bruised fruit. Drinking is encouraged by the prices: pints are the standard fortune (about £7), but most cocktails and a double spirit and mixer are a tenner, cheap in today’s financial lunacy. Still wines get going from £26 and top out at £45, with astonishingly good mark-ups: Chablis from La Chablisienne, a decent producer, is less than twice the price on the shelf. Pol Roger is £75 — in Waitrose, it’s £56. You get the idea: lunches could run on and on here. Ours didn’t — memory is regrettably essential for this column — but it might next time.
Food is just as fair. £2 scampi fries and starters under £9. All of them. There are hotels charging that for water. That £9 might buy a half pint of pink prawns, served in a glass tankard on a doily, like places used to. Tart Marie Rose on the side, too. A tomato salad arrived — good fresh tomatoes, in greens and reds and yellows — with a drizzle of French vinaigrette, nicely heavy on the mustard and not too wayward with the vinegar. In with that were broken up Carr’s table water crackers. I can’t be certain what they were doing there, but we all smiled. A little amateur but, well, it’s a pub. Haute cuisine is not wanted.
This is pub dining the way I remember it growing up, when people went out for fun they could cheerfully afford
There are no mains but pies. The aged beef shin and rib number (£23, including mash and cabbage) was a pie done properly — pastry all over, not just a stew wearing a cap — with the top blackened and heavily peppered, and the meat inside slow-cooked to its point of surrender, soft and rich and tasting of stock and winter nights by the fire. Less successful was the fisherman’s pie, despite a slender langoustine swimming through its mash potato top, clutching a baby bottle of hot sauce in its claw and nibbling on cod’s roe. The mash needed both more butter and white wine sauce, and the whole thing rather more fish. A cheeseboard for £10 seemed impossible to overlook: it came with grapes, good chutney, Jacob’s cream crackers. Doilies? Jacob’s? Carr’s? Sophistication and pretension have been overlooked in favour of old familiar favourites. We sat charmed.
This is not a temple of gastronomic wonder, then, and it is true that keen home cooks — especially those with chic inclinations and worn Ottolenghi recipe books— may find it basic. But the thing is, nostalgia is a sedative of sorts. This is pub dining the way I remember it growing up, when people went out for fun they could cheerfully afford. It’s nice to know someone else hasn’t forgotten about that, either.
23 Rathbone Street, W1. Meal for two about £90; thenewmanarms.co.uk
