Quo Vadis, London: ‘Beyond my most fevered anticipations’ — restaurant review

Founded in 1926 by Pepino Leoni, Quo Vadis is one of the oldest restaurants in Soho. It fell into elegant desuetude in the 1970s and was bought up in 1996 by Marco Pierre White and Damien Hirst, a partnership of sleb chef and YBA that tells you all you need to know about the period.

It then passed into the hands of the Hart Brothers as a private members’ club and, in 2012, Jeremy Lee joined them as chef and partner. Lee had come to London from the east of Scotland to work with Simon Hopkinson at Bibendum, then with Alastair Little and finally as head chef of Terence Conran’s Blueprint Café at the Design Museum, where he stayed for 18 years, a quiet and brilliant presence. To say that Lee is a “much-loved character” of the UK food scene would be as much understatement as cliché.

At Quo Vadis, Lee ran a superb table but his talents were spread between a bijou members’ dining room and an extremely cramped public restaurant downstairs. Last year, Quo Vadis finally got around to rebuilding and entirely upgrading the ground floor into the size and quality of restaurant that everyone agreed Lee deserved. This was a concatenation of fortuitous culinary circumstances on a spectacular scale. The chatterati of the London Food Scene collectively wet themselves.

Cullen skink is named after the small town of Cullen, close enough to Lee’s birthplace in Scotland. It’s a remarkable soup, infinitely superior to chowder in that it allows for a certain delicacy. There have probably been smoked
fish, potato and milk soups in Scotland for as long as there have been potatoes, but Cullen skink particularly requires the Finnan Haddie, a haddock that’s been lightly smoked over peat. Haddock doesn’t take to salting so, unlike kippers, bloaters and “smokies” that were all exported to greedy southerners, the Haddie expressed a subtlety that only locals could experience until refrigeration and fast trains arrived. Lee grew up on dishes like this and is obsessed with their history. Unsurprisingly, his skink is spot on, the mildly fishy stock well buffered with potato and cream and the all-important smoke just drifting over the top like a peat fire at the other end of the village.

Lee’s pie made me understand why people in movies roll over and light a cigarette

Peppered venison, a more regularly sized starter, has a certain Paleolithic charm. Tranches of loin, translucent and incarnadine, are pebble-dashed with rough-crushed peppercorns. Lee serves this with a sweet prune which works well, though some kind of additional fat would have been more to my taste. It’s deeply Scottish in spirit, being simultaneously beautiful and austere . . . 

 . . . which a skate wing really isn’t. It’s such a phenomenal fish, such firm flesh and that tendency to caramelise a little when seared. Of course it needs nothing but brown butter, well, nothing but more brown butter, which the chef seems to have applied first with the brush of a master painter and then with the 12-inch roller of the interior decorator. Absolutely outstanding stuff, with plenty enough left over to dip the exceptional chips. It was a passing and deeply disturbing thought, but if Quo Vadis had served anything as naff as a baguette, I’d have asked for one, soaked it in the fishbutter and packed it with chips. This, of course, would have been an error, because then even I would have had trouble accommodating the pie.

There is something charming about a “pie-of-the-day”, all the more so when today’s turns out to be a chicken velouté pie with a suet crust. If you’re going to understand exactly how excited I got, I’m going to have to take you through it piece by piece.

A good suet crust — and this one was really good — can be rolled thin, so it cooks to an almost inconceivable combination of crispness and flexibility. This one was reminiscent of The Greatest Pie of My Life (Rochelle Canteen at the ICA, Feb 2018). It also makes the crust watertight, so the pie can have a bottom instead of being a mere dish of stew with a fetching pastry fascinator. This was important because velouté (it means velvet in French) is a well-flavoured chicken stock, thickened with roux and cream into something functionally indistinguishable from cream of chicken soup. I hope I’m making myself clear here.

This was beyond my most fevered anticipation. They served it with a soup spoon so you could not only dredge up the big chunks of juicy thigh meat that had been poached in it, but you had the right utensil to have a go at the liquid. I’ve never smoked, but when it was over, Lee’s pie made me understand why people in movies roll over and light a cigarette.

The same balance of craft and comfort, of luxury and prudence, is borne out in the desserts. Not fussy piles. No powdered meadowsweet or freeze-dried woodruff, but proper desserts, lemon tart and an orange crème caramel, almost completely unadorned, sweet but also tart enough to cleanse.

You definitely don’t want to call Lee’s cooking “haute”, it’s far too generous and enjoyable for that. Though it’s profoundly comforting, it’s definitely not that worn-out kind of British “comfort food” either, it’s too considered and lovingly built. The portions are vast, yet there’s still that definite “modern British” aesthetic of “a few brilliant things” on the plate.

Which really only leaves one last question. If, in 2023, Jeremy Lee is finally delivering food of this quality in a room that’s at last been reimagined to its full potential, why on earth have we been waiting since 1926?

Follow Tim on Twitter @TimHayward and email him at [email protected]

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