Greek Street – glorious reflections

Nick’s recent trip down memory lane in London’s Soho.

As I took the photo below of the restaurant’s stylish business card lying somewhat forlornly on the restaurant floor, the waitress tapped me on my shoulder and said, ‘I can get you a clean one if you like’. I declined.

The simplicity of this card captured my attention. 10 GS. Clever in two numbers and letters to encapsulate the restaurant’s full name of 10 Greek Street, with the rest of the information overleaf. It made me think of the business card of my own restaurant L’Escargot which had included a drawing of a rather languid snail.

This was because I was back in Greek Street, for many years my bailiwick. From an afternoon spent, as instructed by my father, on the opposite side of the street from 48 Greek Street counting the (substantial) number of people who walked past in September 1980, to the last time I walked down the front steps whose tiles still proudly bear the snail in tiles, this had been my professional home.

What has changed, I wondered. The answer is: not much physically. Soho Square is still beautiful and today a vibrant green. There is still the oak tree which I helped to plant in memory of L’Escargot's manager’s brother and niece who both died far too young and was planted after the great storm of October 1987.

The House of St Barnabas that inspired Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities stands proudly opposite a modern development that is a Barclay’s bank. Milroy’s, the whisky specialist, still thrives in a more customer-friendly fashion with a whisky bar at the rear. And the street runs across Old Compton Street past Lina Stores, past the Thai restaurant Patara, Café Boheme, Kettner’s and Maison Bertaux until it reaches Chinatown on the other side of Shaftesbury Avenue.

Greek Street has always been known for its restaurants and cafés. It is a vital artery from Tottenham Court Road station to the rest of Soho. It is close to several theatres, most notably the Prince Edward. And there are numerous offices close by. All of these combine to provide customers for the restaurants.

I have to admit to feeling somewhat isolated as a restaurateur when I reopened L’Escargot in June 1981. I was the only British-born member of the Soho Restaurateurs Association, all the others being Swiss, German, Italian, Spanish or Portuguese. And I hardly knew my two long-established restaurateur neighbours along the street: Victor Sassie of The Gay Hussar who considered himself Hungarian but was in fact born in Barrow-in-Furness, and Joseph Berkmann at Au Jardin des Gourmets who was born in Austria and founded Berkmann Wine Cellars.

But that was very much a sign of the times. In the 1980s and for several years afterwards restaurateurs hardly spoke to one another: problems were not to be shared. There were issues but these primarily concerned an outside enemy – the local council or the licensing magistrates who were extremely powerful on those days – rather than mounting a common front to deal with the numerous problems that in those days faced the restaurant industry. I never met Sassie and enjoyed Berkmann’s company only after ill health forced me out of the restaurant business.

Drinkers have always been made welcome on Greek Street, with renowned pubs at each end. The Pillars of Hercules, made famous in the 1970s as the meeting place of writers Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan and Clive James, is at the northern end while The Coach and Horses still trades on the corner with Romilly Street. There are today more cocktail bars than ever along the street as well as the added attraction of the wine list at Noble Rot, which has taken the place of The Gay Hussar.

But Greek Street has always been, for me at least and for obvious reasons, home to one-off restaurants, which was a further attraction of 10 Greek Street when we booked in there recently. It was opened in 2012 by a then young-looking Luke Wilson (whose parents, editor of The Times Charlie Wilson and journalist Sally O’Sullivan, had been customers of mine at L’Escargot) and has remained under the same ownership ever since with quite an emphasis on wine, despite Wilson’s obvious love of lager since he also started the Braybrooke Beer Co in Leicestershire.

The restaurant’s frontage is a large window and very little seemed to have changed inside as we were shown to our table at 8.15 pm. The room was slightly dark. There were at least three blackboards, two with the evening menu on them and one with an intriguing list of bin ends, although most appeared to have been scratched out by the time we sat down. The place was humming with what is perhaps best described as a real Soho crowd – a collection of confident, extremely casually but well-dressed men and women in their forties and above. The noise level was high.

What was interesting to me at least was the tables which Wilson assured me have not been altered since he opened. They are extremely utilitarian with their surfaces extremely easy to keep clean. They also possess a small well which holds the cutlery and a pepper pot. The room holds about 30 with more counter seats opposite the open kitchen at the far end and a private dining room downstairs. The room has been cleverly designed to maximise what is in fact a small space: it would be hard to imagine the room being put to a different, equally profitable use.

The menu, handed to us with a smile, immediately had me reaching for my iPhone. What is a montanara, JR wanted to know? On learning it was small fried pizza, we ordered one, here topped with cime di rapa (Italian broccoli), ’nduja (Calabrian sausage) and scamorza (a soft Italian cheese). This was absolutely delicious, the pizza cooked to the limit with just a hint of burning dough. When I quizzed Wilson about its origins, he was quick to credit their sous chef Vincenzo Giampa with the recipe. And although the internet explains how relatively easy it is to make these at home, I would leave the cooking to the professionals: it was the melding of the vegetables, the molten cheese and the almost burnt dough that I can still recall.

We followed this with a dish of speck, chicory and pecorino (£14) and a couple of small lemon soles topped with samphire and crab butter (£34), happily leaving plenty of room for two excellent desserts: a chocolate and caramel tart with amaretto ice cream (below) and a spiced ginger cake with Yorkshire rhubarb, crème fraîche and pecans, a dish that combined spice and heat as well as the crunch of the nuts.

Having already visited a Vinoteca (purely in the interests of research) we decided against asking for their Black Book which contains an extensive range of fine wines and instead enjoyed a half bottle of 2022 Garnacha ‘Inmune’ from Tandem winery in Navarra for £22 before I paid my bill of £128.25 for the two of us.

I later asked Wilson to describe the biggest changes in his time as a restaurateur and it appears that not even Soho, once recognised as the capital’s late-night neighbourhood, can escape the general move to eating even earlier. ‘We continue to get a lovely mix of interested, enthusiastic and knowledgeable diners visiting the restaurant. But one major change has been eating times. When we first opened we would be busy taking reservations from 5.30 until 10.30 or 10.45. We still have a decent trade early but the later, post-theatre trade has disappeared and it is rare now to welcome anybody arriving after 9.30.’

I suppose this is good news for the staff but would have been unthinkable in my day.

My final question to Wilson was of a general nature: would he agree with me that Soho, and in particular Greek Street, is a great area to be a first-time restaurateur. He would and he elaborated:

‘I agree with you that Greek Street is an excellent place to be a first-time restaurateur, and we have loved being there. The reasons are:

I caveat all of the above just by saying that obviously starting and running a restaurant in any location is incredibly hard currently due to all of the reasons of which I’m sure you are very aware!

10 Greek Street 10 Greek Street, London W1D 4DH; tel: +44 (0)20 7734 4677

Every Sunday, Nick writes about restaurants. To stay abreast of his reviews, sign up for our weekly newsletter.