The Warrington

New gastropubs are always popular, but seldom this popular. I rang The Warrington on the day it opened (6 February), to book dinner the following week. ‘We have a table at 9.30pm Tuesday after next,’ I was told. ‘If you want 8.30pm, you’re looking at March. But if you just show up, you may get a cancellation.’

So we did show up the following week, at 7pm, and waited for a cancellation in the busy ground floor bar. By 9.30pm we’d eaten our way through the entire bar snacks menu in desperation, and decided to call it a night. Still, it gave us ample opportunity to admire one of London’s finest pub interiors, just restored by Gordon Ramsay Holdings.

Established in 1857, the Warrington Hotel (as it was then known) was a grand gesture of a pub; a handsomely-proportioned building which was lavishly decorated around 1900 in an Arts and Crafts movement approach to Art Nouveau. The ground floor has a public bar, plus a larger lounge bar which is Grade II listed. The dark wooden bar is long and curving, and the sloping ceiling above it is adorned with a frieze of bare-breasted nymphs. There’s plenty of etched or stained glass, marbled pillars, bevelled mirrors and statuettes; there’s lots of swirly red, gold and brown, like a chocolate fountain omade from wrapped Easter eggs. A sweeping Scarlett O’Hara staircase leads to the first-floor dining room, which is deadly dull in comparison – a Ramsayfied, ivory-painted box of a room, with a prominent computer screen flashing ‘overbooked’ on several tables simoultaneously. Time to retire to the bar, with the choice of Adnam’s Broadside, Greene King IPA, on Meantime Wheat Beer among the real ales on draught to keep us occupied.

We returned for lunch in the dining room a week later. The room was quieter, the service was sweet but quite ditsy (food was dropped on the table, orders forgotten, attention wandered). Dishes, from the French-accented trad British menu, were variable. We liked the choucroute garni, an Alsatian stew of pork charcuterie and tangy cabbage prettily-presented in a little casserole dish; and the knickerbocker glory was fun, a grown-up reinterpretion of the childhood dessert, this time done with raspberry coulis and top quality ice-cream. But a black pudding salad was overseasoned (too salty and with far too strong a mustard dressing), the slivers of blood pudding dry, and the poached egg cooked solid. As gastropubs go, this was pretty average, though in a far more refined setting than usual.

I suggest going for a pint downstairs to relish the ale and admire the lavishly decorative, Ruskinesque interior; then, toddle down the road to Red Pepper (an excellent local pizzeria) when you want eat, but don't want a month-long wait.
Guy Dimond

Time Out London

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Great pub, unfortunately spoilt by yet another somewhat overrated GRamsey venture. The previous Thai food serving was miles better.
Anonymous  Mar 4 2008