The Bull and Last, Highgate

"The best things in life are free", the Beatles once sang, and certainly in London we're spoiled for choice when it comes to free attractions. There are the museums and art galleries, of course, that goes without saying - the glorious privilege of being able to wander around the Tate Britain or the Victoria and Albert Museum or the National Portrait Gallery is one that we should never take for granted, and that you can do so without spending a single penny makes me feel warm inside.

But as much enjoyment - for free - can be had walking just wandering around. It helps if the bit of London you're wandering around is disarmingly beautiful, of course, and it also helps if at the end of the wandering you have a nice slap-up (albeit not free) pub lunch to look forward to. So a stroll from Hampstead village, across the Heath and ending up in the Bull and Last on Highgate Road ticks all those boxes very well indeed.

The skill and attention to detail displayed in the food at the Bull and Last is quite something to behold. A white onion and thyme soup, presented in a cream stoneware bowl and studded with drops of truffle oil, came partnered with a little mound of sweet deep-fried shallots, which you could use as croutons and add to the soup, or just snack on separately. The soup itself was herby, creamy and gently truffle-y, classical French food reimagined by a smart English gastropub. Marvellous stuff.

The fish platter contained enough variety to keep us amused for a good twenty minutes, trying each element in turn to discover that nearly each was as good as the last. Highlights included a superb house potted shrimp, crunchy and entirely greaseless chipirones (deep-fried baby squid) topped with a very good aioli, and some sweet, moist slices of soda bread. Only some overly salty beetroot-cured "gravadlax" let the side down somewhat, but in the context of everything else it hardly mattered. It all disappeared.

You can tell when I'm having fun in a restaurant when I find room for dessert. Paired with a chocolate mousse dessert that would compare very well to the Louis XV-a-like from Gauthier/Tartufo was a lovely blackberry ice cream. We'd past many bramble bushes in the Heath on the way to lunch; I'd like to think these had been foraged from there but whether they were or not, they still tasted great. Desserts in even some of the smarter gastropubs can be little more than the panacotta/sticky toffee pudding variety, but not so here - this had taken someone quite a bit of time to put together.

Prices are, perhaps, just a tad above what you might expect in your average pub. But the food and service is clearly worth the extra outlay and then some, and I can't imagine anyone would pay their bill begrudgingly after a meal here. A classy, refined place that does everything with charm and flair, it is the pub everyone in London wants but only the residents of Highgate are lucky enough to call it their local. But don't let them have all the fun - wherever you live, next time you set out for a Sunday stroll, see if you can't end up at the Bull and Last. You'll feel right at home.

9/10

The Horseshoe, Hampstead

For reasons which will doubtless never be completely explained, the whole of South London is currently suffering from an epidemic of Massive Pointless Holes In The Road. Quite a feat of engineering they are too, so deep you can't see the bottom, supported by huge steel girders and a good twenty foot across. They're a constant source of fascination to the kids in Battersea, who chuck empty cans of Pepsi down them, perhaps to listen for the clang and figure out how deep they are. And I would be quite happy to leave them to it and gaze in similarly bemused admiration at these Massive Holes, where it not for the fact that the London buses, as dangerously unpredictable as wild Roe Deer at the best of times, now finally have a cast-iron excuse to never be anywhere you expect them to be, and getting in and out of SW11 requires persistence, dedication and a true hunter's instinct. I possess none of these qualities, which is why my journey of approximately eight miles to Hampstead on Saturday afternoon took the best part of three hours. Fortunately, it was worth the effort.


The interior of the Horseshoe, by design or accident, brings to mind the minimalist aesthetics of St. John in Clerkenwell. Huge ceilings and whitewashed walls create a lofty and attractive room, but when it's full it does mean there's a bit of a din. The crowd is as well-heeled as you might expect in this part of town, although luckily - and crucially, for anywhere calling itself a gastropub - there were a number of tables of people just taking advantage of the excellent house ales, and they looked quite at home as well. Some very good house bread arrived along with some unsalted butter, and we made our food selections.


I'm a bit of a purist when it comes to scallops. I have never eaten a preparation I enjoyed more than searing in butter, perhaps with a little garlic, and plonked on a plate, and here they were cooked perfectly - crusty on the outside, sweet and juicy within. A smear of bright red beetroot purée added little other than colour (I have always found beetroot to be a singularly unimpressive vegetable in terms of taste - all mouth and no trousers, so to speak) but thanks to the scallops themselves, this was a very successful starter.


For a main course, I took a huge gamble. The daily special was a Beef Forerib for Two (£40), served sliced on a wooden slab and accompanied by a couple of dainty jugs of roasting jus and a bowl each of perhaps the finest chips in London. Doused in vinegar and salt, these chips would be worth a visit to the Horseshoe alone - triple cooked, presumably, in goose fat and cut to just the perfect size (no "chunky chip" nonsense here, nor the fiddly French Fry cut) they were crunchy and tasty and about as perfect a chip as you could imagine. You'll also have to take my word on this because unfortunately the picture didn't turn out for some reason. The beef, out of interest, was OK. Impressive to look at and cooked reasonably well, it was nevertheless rather bland in taste - Hawksmoor don't have much to worry about just yet. On the other hand, they gave us the leftovers and bones to take home with us and I used them to make rather a good beef stock the next day.


Desserts were competent and reasonably enjoyable but the fact I needed the photographic evidence to even remind me what I ate barely 12 hours ago gives you some indication of how memorable. I should also say a word about the service, which was smiley and efficient and I was so impressed with one particular waitress I punched her in the stomach in gratitude. Actually, it didn't quite happen like that. I was putting my coat on after quite a bit of lovely house Chardonnay (Beresford Highwood (2007) Langhorne Creek - "Excellent producer in Langhorne Creek, south of Adelaide" according to Dan from Bibendum, and a steal at £16 a bottle) and with a particularly flamboyant gesture, made in an attempt to get my left arm through the sleeve of my jacket but rather negligently failing to ensure the area behind me was clear in preparation for such a manoeuvre, I somehow made contact with the stomach of a waitress carrying two plates of hot food. To give credit where credit's due, she absorbed the body blow like a prize boxer and with a stifled whimper delivered the food to the customers just behind us and stiffly backed away. I attempted an apology but I get the feeling she was more concerned with getting out of my reach in case I unexpectedly lashed out again, because she avoided eye contact. Can't say I blame her.


Still, taking into consideration all factors - the ambience, the level of cooking, and the ability of the waiting staff to deal with violently drunken customers, the Horseshoe is a real find. It's reasonably priced, has taken all the good things about the St John philosophy on board without being too pretentious about it, and is one of the few places in this part of town where you really get your moneys worth. The only real issue, for those of us not lucky enough to live within spitting distance of NW6, is that bloody journey. On the other hand, it would keep more than an obstacle course of Massive Pointless Holes to keep me away from the Horseshoe.

8/10