Review: Rochelle Canteen at the ICA, St James

Food has come a long way in the UK in 20 years. I can remember a time when any sort of visitor attraction – be it a zoo, a gallery, a museum or a country house – could be absolutely guaranteed to have a truly miserable canteen where, because you’re a captive audience, you could expect to pay over the odds for sandwiches in packets that conspired to be snot soggy and cardboard dry at the same time, with the filling shuffled to the front edge with deliberate cynicism to hide how little actual industrial cheddar and slimy lettuce was really inside. Or for some hideous hot special dolloped out like school dinners and needing a fistful of tiny condiment packets to give it some flavour. The hot chocolate always tasted like scorched milk peed into by a rat who might have once eaten a bit of kitkat.

Present day, and you can actually get a decent bite to eat in a lot of attractions. I had a lovely slice of lamb and mint pie at the country house somewhere Midlands-ish recently. And some places have even attracted rave-worthy chefs to their canteen. For example, the Rochelle Canteen at the ICA just off the end of Regent’s Park. To be fair, zoos do tend to still charge way over the odds for bloody criminal food; flaccid chips and hotdogs that probably need a biohazard warning. Sadly I suspect it’s because only parents with tiny kids (and us) go to zoos.

We tucked away two courses at the Rochelle Canteen before a show. The menu is short, but everything is appealing. Their style is pared down, take-as-you-find, the kind of dishes that a competent country yeoman could chuck together in his Aga kitchen from good stuff kept in the walk-in larder. Just probably better than most country yeomen would manage.

Our starters are things on toast. Maureen’s is a proudly flavourful chicken liver pate, spread thick, with cornichons. Mind is cold slices of meltingly good rump, cheerfully pink, and covering the slice of toasted sourdough two layers thick. Also covering a thick spread of punchy horseradish cream!

For main, I tuck into a well-grilled middlewhite chop. It goes very well with the friendly dollop of aioli and a very good salad of thinly sliced kohlrabi, fennel and radish. The dressing is zingy and does eventually get a bit much. Maureen’s main is a pie. To be more prosaic, it’s a gratin dish sloppily draped with a thick blanket of naughtily scrumptious short pastry and hiding a splendidly rich and satisfying filling of slow-cooked beef shin with pickled walnut. Scooping out a mouthful while the steam rises out of the pastry it was very hard not to make like the Bisto kid and “Ahhhhhhh!” out loud.

Three courses is going to be £32-ish here, and the wines by the glass aren’t at all budget. To me that’s perhaps the only teensy reservation: the quality of the cooking is excellent, but the pared-back canteen pate-on-toast feel of the place doesn’t really stack up with the price point for me. Might be a failure of imagination on my part. And after all, that pie really was sexy.