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Brutto is an unassuming-looking restaurant up a scruffy side street in London’s Farringdon. Unless you are in the know, it’s not immediately obvious this is one of the most oversubscribed locations in the capital. Its food is Tuscan, Florentine, specifically, simple and unpretentious, the vibe raucous. It’s exactly the New York’s Monkey Bar-meets-Florence’s Sostanza marriage that its originator, the late and much-mourned visionary restaurateur Russell Norman intended it to be.
It’s also one of those places where I’m a regular. Not so much because I’ll call in favours — though I’ve zero shame about doing that these days — but because I’m happy to eat at the bar. Scratch that: I love eating at the bar, perched facing the door, surveying the pulsating scene, elevated enough to be part of it without getting sucked into the melee. I’ve probably now stymied it for myself by writing this — but hey ho.
Why do I like propping up a bar over dinner so much? Perhaps it’s because I once worked in restaurants and this makes me feel like I’m getting close to the action without that fine dining “chef’s table” nonsense, which I loathe — I always feel the poor sods have to be on their best behaviour. (And thrice no to those tables actually in the kitchen. They make me feel like one of those Victorian dames who’d keel up to Bedlam for entertainment.)
I like the informality of it, especially in the US, where nearly every bar, tavern or dive will have some kind of food menu. There’s something exquisitely louche about calling in for a martini, then finding yourself falling into a sloppy burger (at the scuzzier end of things) or oysters Rockefeller (at the other).
It was in Monkey Bar that I first really developed the habit. The backroom restaurant is gorgeous — sexy booths, jazz-age murals and a general air of moneyed racketiness — but I was relegated, with great sniffiness (from me), to the bar up front. Revelation: loved it, loved the drinks, the staff, the crab cakes, the hokey, gingham-ness of it — was that Graydon Carter in the corner?
My best beloved, though, has to be Musso & Frank, an unmissable stop when I’m in LA, with all its delicious, wood-panelled dourness and chicken pot pies, and where barmen seem to be of roughly the same vintage as the circa 1919 building. Sitting at its bar makes me feel, even briefly, like an insider. Like I’m waiting for my pals Marlon and Marilyn.
Or keep me a stool anywhere in the glutton’s paradise that is San Sebastián, where bar dining is largely the only game in town. There’s nothing to unleash the inner Billy Bunter better than knowing that once you’ve dipped your hongos in egg yolk at Ganbara, you can slope off for tortilla at Juantxo, then to Ramuntxo Berri in Gros for txistorras. Nobody sees, nobody judges.
Over here, we haven’t quite got the hang of it — it’s rare to find somewhere you can go just for a drink that can serve you dinner on the hop (and no, not McCoy’s and a Scotch egg). Although I can’t forget the bliss of a hot Scotch pie at Glasgow’s historic Horseshoe bar.
Some people dislike bar eating. At a previous publication, commenters would complain bitterly should a place I reviewed feature stools rather than upholstered furniture. (Fortunately I’m sufficiently upholstered that this doesn’t bother me.) And, true, if your party is any larger than a pair, bar dining means conversational tennis ahoy.
I’m not entirely gregarious — and a career of anonymity hasn’t improved my ability to mingle: I make Sartre look like a Chuckle Brother. But at the bar, I’ve rarely had a problem with other people. OK, maybe other than the stealth-MAGA couple I met at classic Brat Pack hang-out Seymour’s in Palm Springs with whom I got into something of a spat. But drinks were so expertly mixed, snacks so pleasingly fatty and salty, that I found the experience bracing rather than tense.
At the bar, I’ll even happily chat to (most) strange men: the bibulous and lecherous elderly actor in Sheekey’s, the conspiracy theorist at Glasgow’s Brett, the baseball-capped bros in the Florida Keys who astutely pointed out, “You’re not from round here”, before asking if we had electricity in Scotland. The bar affords extroverts a platform, and semi-introverts a safe place, to talk, make connections, expand under the watchful eye of the charming bartenders. Bye, then — it’s been lovely hanging with you. Oh, go on then: martini, super-dry, twist. And maybe a lobster roll?
Marina O’Loughlin is a writer, editor and restaurant critic. This is the last of four summer columns
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