Restaurant reviews: Giles Coren at Saf, London EC2

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Hmmmmm.Heres the link. You can add comments if you like?

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/eating_out/giles_coren/article4557548.ece

 

That’s the thing with lipogrammatic literature (in which the author imposes some sort of restraint or deprivation on himself, often to get the juices flowing when there is a creative blockage – a sort of creative sadomasochism): it can be incredibly impressive, but it can never have real soul. La Disparition is the best novel I have ever read which doesn’t have any e’s in it, but it isn’t nearly as good as any of the novels I have read which do.

These weird little novels came back to me last night when I was sitting in Saf, a restaurant that is not only vegan, but almost entirely raw (barely any cooking goes on, just a little blanching), and, halfway through the meal, the random (thankfully carnivorous) flopsy I had taken along for company said, “It’s all done very well, but it’s a bit like looking at a painting where the artist has only been allowed to use green and blue – the things in it still look like things, it’s just that it’s positively screaming out for some reds and yellows.â€

Yup, exactly. Or some e’s. Literature is built on e’s, just as haute cuisine (to which, with its “botanical fine diningâ€, Saf clearly aspires) is built on meat. You can take them away and try to do it without them. And it is sort of possible. And people will no doubt clap politely. But they will not drool. Their hearts will not race. They will not weep.

I am not in any way hostile to vegetarianism or veganism. I am not one of those Shire Tory fatties who make jokes about “people who knit their own yoghurt†and chortle till they choke on their pork chop. I accept (up to a point) the neo-Malthusian projection which says that past a certain population point only non-livestock farming can sustain life on earth, and I accept totally the health benefits of a (mostly, but not entirely) vegetable diet.

I even accept that vegetarians (and even vegans) can be (although usually are not) great lovers of food. But I reserve the right to observe that, with the exception of those religiously or medically constrained to the meat-free or meat-and-dairy-free diet, they usually do not love themselves very much.

Like any food fad, vegetarianism (and veganism especially) is so often a smoke screen adopted to disguise a body-dysmorphic eating disorder. It is simply an excuse not to eat. And, indeed, Saf, which has done very well in the reviews, was positively rammed to the rafters, on a lazy Monday night in high summer, with very thin people, mostly women. (Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a complaint – better vegans than fat people.)

It’s a funky, warehousey, Shoreditchy sort of place (I saw at least two Hoxton fins, previously thought to have been extinct since 2002) with clean lines, a long, sexy bar, hard-edged, boxy tables and stools, and a restrained, rather minimalist outside space, with white walls and stripling bamboo whistling in the breeze.

The staff are kind and solicitous, and were quick to say that we should notify them of any allergies. Although I could not see anything on the menu of twiddled-up crudités to which one could possibly be allergic. Nuts, I suppose (from which Saf makes its “cheeseâ€), and wheat, which is used only sparingly.

There was apparently only one non-vegetarian waitress (by far the healthiest-looking staff member), who, while insisting that she loved the food, suggested that we ate four starters, two mains and a couple of sides if we wanted to be full. She also said that she relished the nightly staff meal but that (unlike her vegetarian colleagues) she was usually starving hungry by the second half of her shift. Indeed, the staff here seemed an impossibly ascetic bunch – best exemplified by the wafer-thin, pale-faced young barman whom I spotted nipping outside at one point, for a crafty apple.

We had “caviar†that was a sprinkle of chive pearls (made by a process borrowed from Ferran Adria’s molecular gastronomy) on little potato cakes with sour cream, in essence four minuscule canapés for £6.50. Then ravioli that was four more canapés made from folding raw slivers of beetroot around “cashew herb ricotta†(£6.50). And then four warmish dumplings of spinach and water chestnut (£6) and of shitake and tofu (£6) that were wholesome and crunchy but a long, long way from the life-affirming punch of common-or-garden dim sum served at full throttle.

“Farm salad†(£6) was a long row of small, boiled potato halves, with parallel rows of barely cooked tomatoes and double-shelled broad beans under a scatter of watercress. The linguine in Linguine Alfredo (£10) were long shavings of raw courgette dressed with an ersatz pesto and truffle oil that was really hard to get down, with its cold, slimy texture and unpleasant faecal whiff (note to chefs: truffle oil does not work on cold green veg). It is such a shame that the food most likely to help you live for ever manages simultaneously to deprive you of the will to live.

“Lasagne†(£11) was a tower (made the old-fashioned Eighties way, by cramming things into a pastry cutter) of olives, mushrooms, courgettes and “walnut bolognaiseâ€, which tasted only of familiar vegan horrors (as with so much vegan food, most of the dishes featured a clash of high, wheatgrassy chlorophyll notes with the rude, sweaty aggression of sesame oil).

The most complex flavour came from some smoked fresh tofu glazed with green tea in the “Buddha bowl†(£9.50), which got closest to the taste of the meat-searing “maillard reaction†that stirs the atavistic yearnings, and gives actual pleasure.

Even as I (smugly) write “atavisticâ€, it occurs to me that defensive vegans (is there another kind?) will say that we humans were designed to eat like this. That we were originally foragers of berries and roots. But that was only when there was no fresh meat (or even carrion) available. And as I sat there with a feeling not of fullness exactly, but of having ploughed through a hundredweight of crudités, or of having drunk a gallon of tap water, it occurred to me that our ancestors of a million years ago must occasionally, indeed, have felt like this after dinner. But only on one of those rainy nights in the cave, when nobody had managed to bag a mammoth.

Indeed, scanning Saf’s pale denizens it occurred to me what a vicious circle meatlessness can generate: for there was not a man among the weeds and waifs in there who looked physically up to the job of killing a mammoth. Or even a mouse.

Saf

152-154 Curtain Rd, London EC2 (020-7613 0007)

Meat/fish: 10 (Obviously, no animal welfare issues at all)

Cooking: 8 (It’s done well, you have to say)

Smiling: 9 (Our carnivorous waitress was very smiley)

Score: 9 (Absurd – shows how pointless scoring is)

 

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