It’s all cranes and cool people round London’s King’s Cross these days. The halo of grime that blooms around train stations has been scrubbed away. So you walk up a curiously quiet pedestrian road paved with honey coloured gravel, cross a zebra crossing where even the London cabbies come to a calm stop to let you by. Then it’s over a canal with the stream of young, hip students from Central St Martin’s art college and into French chef Bruno Loubet’s Grain Store.
If there once was a smell of wheat in this handsome brick building, it’s long since been replaced by the smell of money. A couple and their bored teenage son dressed head to toe in designer smart casual are flicking through a Knight Frank set of listings. I imagine they’re choosing a bolthole for young Johnny as he does his BA in culture, criticism and curating. It all adds to the feeling that London is shedding itself of poor people like a snake shedding its skin. Poor being anyone who doesn’t indulge in a spot of apartment shopping before a late lunch.
The Grain Store is Loubet's Alain Passard moment. It's a French chef declaring that the days of meat are numbered. This in a city where blokeish infantilised cooking puts steaming juicy heaps of meat at the heart of it all. (Yes, I'm looking at you Duck and Waffle's revolting ox cheek doughnut). Vegetables are the thing here. Smart ones cleverly cooked. Next generation greens.
I’m too late for lunch and too early for dinner so the all-day bar menu is the only option. It’s no sloppy seconds. First up a wine glass full of frothy golden beet juice with bee pollen. It smells like a spadeful of claggy wet soil, eau de earthworm, but is deliciously sweet and fresh. Then there’s a £3 bowl of Parmesan biscuits, orange, and crumblier than a Greek bailout and tasting of butter, flour and cheese. They’re perfect with the garden juice in a glass.
A round slab of tree arrives dressed with pine branches and topped with a pile of round wild mushroom croquettes like a nest laid by a large bird on a productivity drive. Inside the skin-thin panko crust there are hot shards of woodsy mushroom, making me wonder at the skilled hands that rolled these into coherent spheres without the aid of gluey globs of bechamel. The menu lists pine needle salt as an ingredient. I can’t say I’m getting much of it. There is some tiny hint of forest in the flavour which is preferable to an overpowering Toilet Duck blast.
A dish of paella rice is topped with a mound of vegetables so large they require a fair degree of cutting and chewing. This is a fork-and-knife paella. The best things on the plate are the piquillo peppers which have been roasted, skinned and then charred on a griddle so they look like tongues with tattoos. And they’re delicious. There are quarters of fennel bulbs and braised celery and a vegetable chorizo. Made from pulses, tomatoes and spices, the veg-chorizo has all the spicy paprika kick you get from the meat version but none of the lusciousness. I admire the effort but it makes me miss meat. Underneath all this there’s a saffron drenched bed of gorgeous rice. Shards of basil and flat leaf parsley and a good squeeze of lemon give it a summery finish.
The tart of the day is pear and blackberry, as professional a wedge of French pastry cooking as I’ve had. A wafer thin base of flaky pastry topped with a hint of almond and then fruit trapped in a sugary jelly glaze.
As I’m leaving, the young nearly all-bloke kitchen team are sitting down around a large table for a meeting in the lull before dinner service. They’re doing something light and lovely here, even in the all-day bar menu, typically where food ambitions go to die. The building might be old London, but the ideas are all about tomorrow.
Lunch came to £41.85/€57.37 with beetroot juice and a coffee.
