Except that I couldn’t do it. Placing a pure lump of hydrogenated vegetable fat which looked as if it had been hanging round since Serbia was in Yugoslavia in my mouth was more than I could contemplate. The raw horse was rather good, with a very smooth, paté-like texture and a lean, gamey taste. Spread on crisp toasts, it would have made a decent picnic for a night on the barricades, but I couldn’t fool myself. I had been faced down by a Balkan delicacy. I couldn’t even manage a chip.
Back in London, Barnyard on Charlotte Street also promises an authentically rustic experience, suitably prettied up for the urban rover. It’s the casual offering from Ollie Dabbous, the brilliant young chef whose eponymous restaurant round the corner in Whitfield Street opened to a rush of rave reviews and a Michelin star in 2012. Ollie is a delightful man and his food is truly extraordinary, which makes it all the more startling that he should have put his name to a concept which is such unmitigated crap.
The interior looks like a country kitchen reimagined by the Sylvanian Families, an achingly awkward juxtaposition of faux rural and faux industrial. The waiters wear flannel shirts and hay is involved, but the food manages to be even clumsier and more relentlessly patronising than the décor.
The menu is divided into Pig, Cow and Lamb, because obviously it’s macho to call a spade a spade down on the farm. Cubes of adequate cornbread came in dinky brown paper bags, with a dreary salad of chicken, grapes, almonds and tarragon and a bavette with dill pickle and black treacle. The meats oozed a positively Balkan amount of grease, as though they had been squirted with oil in the prep line to give them that genuine street food mouth-feel. That is, slimy and regrettable. The food had been slapped onto the plates with an aggressive lack of finesse, the ingredients disassembling themselves sadly, wanting nothing to do with one another. Sides of chicory with mint and lemon and of charred broccoli in vinaigrette were not actively foul, merely negligible.
Potkovica was nasty, but Barnyard is nasty in an infuriating, disingenuous, condescending manner, flaunting the amateurism of its kitchen as a badge of hip sincerity. Unless one were actually in a besieged city, I can’t imagine what kind of posturing idiot would actively want to eat here; certainly no one who’d be much use with a grenade.
Masculinity and food are in a complex place. The distance between man the hunter and man the consumer has never been wider, yet the lumbersexual’s need to prove his prowess with a gizzard has never been greater.
It can’t be an accident that the sub-moronic “paleo” diet fad is based on the supposed preferences of our early Homocene ancestors: caveman food for men who are actually frightened of a baguette.
I don’t know whether homo erectus ate horses as well as drawing them, but if you want to be reminded what a real man looks like, serve him a margarine quenelle. Time Out lists Barnyard as one of its ten best London restaurants this year. Presumably they don’t employ Serbians.
Back in London, Barnyard on Charlotte Street also promises an authentically rustic experience, suitably prettied up for the urban rover. It’s the casual offering from Ollie Dabbous, the brilliant young chef whose eponymous restaurant round the corner in Whitfield Street opened to a rush of rave reviews and a Michelin star in 2012. Ollie is a delightful man and his food is truly extraordinary, which makes it all the more startling that he should have put his name to a concept which is such unmitigated crap.
The interior looks like a country kitchen reimagined by the Sylvanian Families, an achingly awkward juxtaposition of faux rural and faux industrial. The waiters wear flannel shirts and hay is involved, but the food manages to be even clumsier and more relentlessly patronising than the décor.
The menu is divided into Pig, Cow and Lamb, because obviously it’s macho to call a spade a spade down on the farm. Cubes of adequate cornbread came in dinky brown paper bags, with a dreary salad of chicken, grapes, almonds and tarragon and a bavette with dill pickle and black treacle. The meats oozed a positively Balkan amount of grease, as though they had been squirted with oil in the prep line to give them that genuine street food mouth-feel. That is, slimy and regrettable. The food had been slapped onto the plates with an aggressive lack of finesse, the ingredients disassembling themselves sadly, wanting nothing to do with one another. Sides of chicory with mint and lemon and of charred broccoli in vinaigrette were not actively foul, merely negligible.
Potkovica was nasty, but Barnyard is nasty in an infuriating, disingenuous, condescending manner, flaunting the amateurism of its kitchen as a badge of hip sincerity. Unless one were actually in a besieged city, I can’t imagine what kind of posturing idiot would actively want to eat here; certainly no one who’d be much use with a grenade.
Masculinity and food are in a complex place. The distance between man the hunter and man the consumer has never been wider, yet the lumbersexual’s need to prove his prowess with a gizzard has never been greater.
It can’t be an accident that the sub-moronic “paleo” diet fad is based on the supposed preferences of our early Homocene ancestors: caveman food for men who are actually frightened of a baguette.
I don’t know whether homo erectus ate horses as well as drawing them, but if you want to be reminded what a real man looks like, serve him a margarine quenelle. Time Out lists Barnyard as one of its ten best London restaurants this year. Presumably they don’t employ Serbians.
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