For this edition, I thought I ought to do a business lunch or two. I’m a freelancer, so my relationship with my paper resembles that of William Boot and the Daily Beast in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. Occasionally, I put on a suit and take the train down from The Country, to dine, bewildered, with my editor. So I asked her, “Where do you chaps go for your long, champagne-lubricated lunches?” and she seemed a little baffled. My image of the modern fourth estate may be askew. Nevertheless, she suggested Sweetings. “And, if you’re going to Sweetings,” she said, “you need to go with Paul Murphy.”
I should probably explain here that I’ve always felt awkward describing myself as a “journalist”. I visit restaurants and then opine in a hopefully amusing and entertaining way. No legwork, personal risk or long, sleepless nights at the keyboard. But that is still the dream. I’m a Woodward of the wine list or Bernstein of brunch, if only in my mind. But Paul Murphy is the real deal. He founded Alphaville, the FT’s daily news and commentary service for financial market pros, and now heads up the investigations team. He’s a highly experienced Proper Journalist with a string of awards. Yeah, sure, I’d like to have met him at midnight in a darkened parking structure, after changing cabs to lose my tail. But lunch at his favourite restaurant might be as close as I can safely get.
Sweetings has been on the corner of Queen Victoria Street, a few hundred metres from the FT, since 1889. It’s got its original interior, long dark wood bars and high perching stools, soaring windows, walls of the sort of “magnolia” colour they used to paint railway waiting rooms. It’s unchanged and unchanging. Rigid with tradition, yet noisy, informal and weirdly democratic. Everyone gets the same treatment. Everyone gets the same unchallenging food.
I ordered crab mayonnaise and Murphy, who seems to know the menu by heart, had smoked salmon with capers, brought to our table from an ancient “dumb waiter” lift in the corner. The plates are thick, creamy china, no younger than the paintwork, but they thud reassuringly as they hit the Formica. It’s good stuff. Solid, not messed with. Decent seafood prepared with this little intervention might just be my favourite thing, so I’m a soft target.
Murphy orders a Dover sole, a simple call with little space to mess up. I go for a belting piece of halibut with mustard sauce, chips and a side of samphire. Halibut’s one of those muscular fish that tyros say “tastes just like chicken” but has black skin on the top side, giving the unnerving image of a chicken wearing a wetsuit when it was netted. Mine was perhaps a tad underdone close to the bone, but I’m probably the only bloke in the room who prefers it that way. No points deducted.
I think I expected Murphy to look like Jason Robards as Ben Bradlee, but he’s not like that. He looks totally normal. Thinking back, he’s very hard to describe, almost professionally unassuming and frighteningly easy to talk to. Quiet, calm, dry humour. Christ, I didn’t even make a note of his hair colour and he’s probably got my inside leg measurement and tax code. In my imagination, Sweetings is a little secret enclave, not of influencers but the influential. Murphy’s natural habitat. Moving invisible, among the powerful. Observing, recording, analysing.
Sweetings almost doesn’t feel like a restaurant. More a canteen or a mess. Somewhere where food is not a performance, more a functional delivery of nourishment. And yet I feel ridiculously pleased with myself for being here.
The menu has been characterised cruelly as “nursery food”, with the assumption that Englishmen prefer the stuff they were fed by nanny, but that misses the greater point. This is the kind of thing served in public school refectories, in university halls, in officer’s messes, gentlemen’s clubs and probably the Houses of Parliament. It’s historically the food of the English establishment and therefore, irredeemably the food of men. And Sweetings is its temple.
Of course, we need to address that. So, a week later, I persuade my editor to come with me for a second visit with a different perspective. I asked if she’d been before and she told me she had, with a celebrated restaurant writer, when they suffered the misfortune of being two women in one of the most unreconstructed joints still surviving. These two near-strangers smiling politely at each other and talking shop were asked by the puzzled waitress if they were mother and daughter enjoying a birthday meal.
I take a seat at the bar this time — my favourite way to eat — but when she arrives I realise I’ve already screwed up. As a bloke, I’m happy to sit like this, shoulder-to-shoulder facing front like Spartans. The way men conduct their most intimate conversations, like you would at a workbench or in the cockpit of a bomber. I had forgotten that conversation with my editor requires arm waving and eye contact. Perched here at the bar, that’s going to require what yoga practitioners call an Asana.
My editor suggests we try the Black Velvet, the drink for which Sweetings is famous. It’s half and half Guinness and champagne, served in a silver tankard. It tastes, distantly, of silver polish. She says she’d have preferred champagne or Guinness. I honestly wouldn’t have minded silver polish.
By adapting Ardha Matsyendrasana (Half Lord of the Fishes) for a seated posture I can see into a meeting room with huge windows in a shiny modern office block opposite the restaurant. A group of young suits seems to be doing some sort of training session. I fear for them. In a previous corporate life, I used to lead things like that and I’m still neurasthenic about the platters from Pret, the “working lunch” at such revels. Projected on the screen are the words “Ships & Sailors” and my soul shrivels in sympathy.
When Sweetings was built, a helpful barman told us, there was no need for ladies’ toilets. They’ve installed one since, but my editor reports that reaching it required walking through a prep kitchen where someone was slicing lemons. The urinals, our barman proudly pointed out, “are listed”.
This time I ordered the fish pie and it is transcendent. Not like the fish pie at school, which tasted like tinned cat food. It didn’t even make me misty-eyed for my mum’s fish pie, which occasionally had frozen peas in it and could frankly choke a goat. No, it was the Grand Unified Archetype of what every fish pie ever believed it could become. The fish pie I wasn’t even aware I needed so very badly. A Euclidean fish pie, a Jungian fish pie, a fish pie of dreams. I am bathed in deep contentment.
Neither of us went to public school, are members of White’s or were commissioned in a fashionable regiment. Neither of us had nannies. And yet we find ourselves to be, well, at least “at home” in the weirdness. It’s a bolt-hole for some of the most influential individuals in the City yet it’s got a kind of squat-and-gobble democracy that’s seductive.
By the time we get to the apple and berry crumble with a small jug of compulsory custard, I feel I’ve given a reasonable account of myself conversationally, but my L4-6 vertebrae feel like hot cobbles in a sweat sock. When we get up to leave and I swing my legs towards the centre of the room, my spine makes a noise like the gearbox of a Land Rover coming suddenly to the end of its life. In a more comfortable seat, close to the window, I am unsurprised to notice Murphy, who acknowledges me with a tiny, professional nod. My God. Is this it? He did it with such subtlety that I can’t be 100 per cent sure, but I think I might have finally arrived among the movers and shakers.
Over at Ships & Sailors, they’re doing a jolly little hornpipe with saluting, and then rushing for the remaining chairs. Some sort of motivating game, I suppose, with an improving subtext. If that’s what the City has become, Christ, I hope Sweetings lives on, unchanged forever.
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