Clarke’s in London Redefines Restaurant

Clarke’s has been called “Anglo-French” and also “Californian.” Proprietor Sally Clarke herself has been called one of the best chefs in London. She has also been accused of not running a “real” restaurant at all--because, like her mentor Alice Waters at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, she offers only one prix fixe dinner nightly.

Well, I suppose there are many ways of defining “real.” But sitting in the downstairs dining room at Clarke’s recently--eating a salad of perfect grilled salmon set off by the contrasting sweet/bitter/salty/minty flavors of roasted peppers, rocket leaves (arugula), black olives and basil mayonnaise; a juicy corn-fed pigeon grilled with sage and garlic, served with a corn pancake and a parchment-paper packet of parsnips, carrots, shallots and potatoes, roasted to the point of caramelization in rich butter and fresh herbs; a selection of English farmhouse cheeses with homemade oatmeal crackers, and a light raspberry-filled meringue with homemade pistachio ice cream--I remember thinking that this seemed to me about as real as food could get.

Clarke is a slender, pretty young woman who seems almost obsessively dedicated to her craft (her workday commonly begins at 7 a.m. and ends after dinner). And she learned a lot about the restaurant business in Southern California. One morning in September, over espresso in the cheery, art-filled street-level portion of her establishment, she told her culinary story:

“I was born and brought up in Guildford, near London. I was one of three children, and each of us had a specific job around the house. Mine had always been helping to make the meals, so when I was about 12 1/2 and needed to earn some money for riding holidays, my mother suggested that I should go to work for a local caterer. I did, and I loved it.

“After high school, I took a two-year hotel and restaurant course at Croydon Technical College. I was taught how to clean the bathrooms and put cherries on top of half-grapefruits and dreadful things like that. Then I decided that I wanted to learn the frilly bits. I applied to the Cordon Bleu in London, but they turned me down. When I wrote to the Cordon Bleu in Paris, though, they basically said, ‘If you’ve got the money, you can come.’ I went, and while I was there I met Michael McCarty (of Michael’s in Santa Monica, etc.) and Ricardo Jurado-Solares (who now helps manage McCarty’s Adirondacks restaurant in Washington). This was my first (exposure to) Americans, and it was more of a shock than Paris itself.”

Clarke supplemented her classes by visiting local restaurants and markets and cooking informal dinners with McCarty and his friends. “Then I decided that if I really wanted to learn about food, I should work professionally in Paris. A friend of Michael’s told me to go see Raymond Oliver at Le Grand Vefour (then a three-star restaurant). I remember that I stood outside the place for hours, afraid to go in. Finally I got up the nerve. Oliver was very sweet, and immediately picked up the phone and called his son Michel, who had just opened the Bistro de Paris, and told him that he thought he ought to hire me.”

She worked with Oliver and his chef at the time, Pierre Vedel (he later went on to open a respected restaurant of his own) for three months. They treated her as something of a novelty, she says, but she says she “saw a lot.”

Clarke then moved on to two other Paris restaurants, the traditional Le Recamier and the decidedly non-traditional Au Pactole, then in its heyday under owner-chef Jacques Maniere. “After that,” says Clarke, “I thought I knew everything there was to know about food, and I wanted to be a writer.”

With this in mind, she moved back to London and wrote to two Englishwomen prominent in the field--Elizabeth David and Prue Leith. David called her up and said something like, “If you want to be a writer, just start writing.” Leith interviewed her, and ended up hiring her to work in her catering company. She later helped Leith set up her cooking school.

“In the middle of all this,” she says, “Michael McCarty called me up out of the blue and said, ‘I’m opening a restaurant in L.A. next month, and I want you to come over and help.’ Of course, he hadn’t even found a site yet. But we basically just ran around L.A. with his mom and dad and his girlfriend, Kim (now Mrs. McCarty), eating out, seeing what other people were doing, doing ‘market research.’ When he found a bar on a side street in Santa Monica called Brigadoon, he basically shoved me in the front door and said, ‘Go see what the ladies’ loos are like.’ The Brigadoon, of course, eventually turned into Michael’s.”

Clarke helped set up Michael’s, but had to return to England before it opened. Back in L.A. a few months later, she went to work at the restaurant, cooking with chef Jonathan Waxman during the day and working the door with McCarty at night. That lasted about 18 months. After another brief stay in London, she returned to California and worked the door at the West Beach Cafe in Venice and then again at Michael’s. During this time, she recalls, somebody took her to Chez Panisse in Berkeley. It was a revelation.

“I just couldn’t believe it,” she says. “From the time I’d been 13 or 14, I’d always had this fantasy about a restaurant where there’d be just one menu, where it would be sort of like cooking for my family--and that’s just what Chez Panisse was doing.”

Inspired by the Berkeley landmark, Clarke resolved to open her own place, and to do it in London. She returned to the city in 1983, found a location on an antique shop-filled stretch of Kensington Church Street, and opened Clarke’s in December of 1984 with her one-menu-a-night policy. (Clarke will vary the dinner menu only to the point of preparing vegetarian meals on request. At lunchtime, though, there is a choice of three appetizers and three main dishes--because, says Clarke, “We get a lot of business trade during the day, with people meeting each other for the first time, and if there was no flexibility, it might embarrass some people.”)

Last year, Clarke added a shop called “& Clarke’s” next door, where she sells California wines, British cheeses (superb and varied--a real revelation to anyone who thinks that subject begins with chewy yellow Cheddar and ends with plastic Stilton), homemade chocolate truffles, and roughly a dozen kinds of homemade bread and rolls--also served generously in the restaurant.

Clarke’s doesn’t exactly look Californian, but it does seem more Los Angeles than London. And the ever-changing menu owes an obvious debt to contemporary Californian cooking (and thus by extension, of course, to traditional Mediterranean cuisine).

There might be yellow pepper soup with olive oil, Parmigiano and assorted crostini ; homemade ravioli filled with bufala mozzarella and poached in a light roasted tomato broth; grilled tuna salad with garlic toast; grilled boneless quail with chile-and-orange-zest butter; grilled salmon char with shallot and nasturtium sauce; grilled breast of wild duck accompanied by braised leg of duck with herb-infused white beans; coffee granite with lemon shortbread; pear and Armagnac brioche tart with prune ice cream, and melon and purple figs in light mint syrup.

This is fresh, honest, gloriously simple food, cooked exactly right. And if that’s not “real,” I don’t know what is.