Vervain, Birch, 126 Addington Road, South Croydon, CR2 8YA (020 3953 3000, birchcommunity.com). Meal for two: starters £8-£14, mains £16-£36, desserts £6-£9, wines from £30
Ghost Town by the Specials is echoing through the empty foyer of Birch, a big chunk of redbrick hotel set in 200 acres of grounds on that southern edge of Croydon known as Selsdon. There are many tunes you could pipe into the deserted public spaces of a hotel on a Sunday night; Ghost Town really shouldn’t be one of them. Terry Hall’s mournful hymn to urban abandonment bounces around the broad entry hall with its delicately painted floral ceiling and its chunks of marquetry art.
Happily, there is more life in the dining room of the hotel’s brasserie. It’s called Vervain, another name for verbena. Yes, it may be a Sunday night, but here they are, beneath the wicker-globe lampshades and the peach-painted cornicing and the rumble of 70s disco, with their ice buckets and their cocktails. This is a new iteration of the building, previously another hotel before being taken over by the same group behind Birch in Cheshunt. The big idea: a bloom of nature on the city’s fringes. The surrounding golf course is being rewilded. The presiding chef, Lee Westcott, has planted a kitchen garden and promises to forage some of his ingredients from the grounds. Foraging in Croydon sounds less like a gastronomic imperative than the title of an indie band’s difficult second album. Then again, round here the roads are leafy and the houses are big. Perhaps there’s good eating to be had from those hedgerows.
Westcott has form. He was once Tom Aiken’s head chef. He ran restaurants for Jason Atherton in Hong Kong and then opened the much-admired Typing Room at Town Hall Hotel in Bethnal Green. For a while he was at Pensons in Worcestershire, which won a star from a tyre company. Now, here he is at Birch with two restaurants. Elodie is his grand statement. It offers a six-course tasting menu for £69-a-head. It’s Westcott doing the thing with which he made his name. And I’m purposefully ignoring it. Running a smart, ambitious, bells-and-whistles restaurant is tough. But overseeing a utilitarian brasserie like Vervain, which must cater to those staying for multiple days and who just want to be fed, but without being bored senseless, can be harder. Can an ambitious chef make the everyday interesting?
First signs are not reassuring. The young waiters are friendly, but doubtless through a failure of training, not exactly proactive. We have to stop passing waiters to ask for almost everything: a drink, a menu, just to order. The £14 charged for a plate of crudité blissfully straight out of 1978, alongside a solid if unremarkable hummus, feels excessive. We enjoy the slabs of lightly toasted sourdough with Marmite butter dusted with roasted yeast, though not enough to accept the second portion they mistakenly bring us, even though it’s been far better and more appealingly toasted.
Then the starters arrive and everything improves. Each of the dishes carries the big fat thumb print of a chef who understands the fundamentals of these dishes, but knows how to add wit and drama. Cod’s roe is whipped to a light frothiness and comes topped with crisp cubes of pickled kohlrabi and gratings of cured egg yolk. It’s a better use for the toasted sourdough than the Marmite butter. A terrine of confit chicken arrives as a Jenga-style block, flecked with sweet strands of apricot and with just the right glaze of meaty jelly to keep it together. Alongside is a dollop of black garlic purée and a red onion marmalade.
Serious attention has been paid to the non-meat options. A beetroot “tartare” has been diced, mixed with capers, shallots and chives and sprinkled with addictively crispy golden strands of potato-like vermicelli. The light bitterness of endive plays catch-up with the sweetness of the beetroot. The same commitment is obvious in a vegan main course of grilled courgette with courgette flowers filled with a tomato and aubergine stew. They are laid on a lightly acidic pea purée and a pleasingly grainy pistachio pesto. It’s a delightful cacophony of sprightly green things. By daylight it will doubtless match the view of the rewilded lawns outside.
A menu like this is required to have standard options: a steak, a burger and so on. But even the half rotisserie chicken here gets the nod. The skin, like the accompanying chips, is amber-golden and crisp; the aioli alongside brings something to the game without alienating your loved ones. A slab of skin-on cod comes in a thick but smooth pond of yellow bell pepper sauce given vigour and depth by a burst of citrus. Soft, nutty beads of barley provide substance. Fresh garden peas pop. A few plump mussels help lead the whole plate down to the shore’s edge. Again, hungry thought and care has gone into making this piece of cod shine.
At the end comes a slice of dark chocolate tart that is so precise and so very fine, it looks like you could cut your finger on its edges. The pastry is miraculously thin and crisp, the filling as dark and deep as the smallest hours of night before dawn. A strawberry trifle, its surface thickly covered with freeze-dried fruit, is an equally delightful piece of work. Trifle should make you smile. This one does. But oh, that tart. It is testament to a pastry section that is lousy with standards.
Despite the frankly weird price tag on the hummus, everything else feels fair. Croydon’s famed demi monde won’t be put off by the tenner or so charged for starters and the mains priced mostly in the high teens. On Fridays and Saturdays, I suspect the bar here is a noisy mess of chatter, shots and barely sublimated sexual tension. That said, for all the breathless talk of the facilities – the outdoor pool, the “wellness space”, the kid-friendly wing – Birch feels very much like a work in progress. My wife, Pat, comes back from the ladies with photos of a knackered old-school public convenience in desperate need of care. Our builder is also eating with us; you build a proper bond with a man when he knocks the back off your house. He returns from the men’s, rolling his eyes at the shoddy silicon sealant work. I take a look. He’s not wrong. You could peel it from the tiling like fishy lumps of Copydex off your hands. They must have a snag list as long as a novel. I really hope they get it sorted soon. The terrific cooking here seriously deserves a tidier, snazzier setting.
News bites
The spice company Steenbergs has launched three new spice blends in collaboration with the cook and food writer Sabrina Ghayour, to mark the publication of her latest book. It includes the Persiana blend, a mix of sumac, lime powder, cumin, coriander, cinnamon, garlic powder, cayenne and rose petals, which draws on recipes from her first bestselling book of the same name, published in 2014. It sits alongside the Bazaar blend, which is suitable for everything from roast meat and fish to salads and rice dishes, and the Flavour blend, named after the new title published this month (steenbergs.co.uk).
Ashley Palmer-Watts, the former head chef of Dinner by Heston Blumenthal and before that The Fat Duck, is to return to the restaurant sector after a three-year break. The Garden Cobham, which opens next spring, will include a wine bar, café, bakery, and a 35-seat high end restaurant, all operating in and around a courtyard. The venture will include a large kitchen garden.
St Andrews is to be the site of the second T-Squared Social, the new sports bar venture from Tiger Woods and Justin Timberlake. The first opened in New York last month. The bar and gastropub, which opens next spring, will include golf swing simulators, bowling lanes and darts, and will occupy the site of the New Picture House Cinema.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
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