For some reason, new-wave Old English food is something you normally only find in pubs. There is of course a famous exception – the founder of the movement, St John of Smithfield. But the vast majority of St John’s imitators and inspirees are pubs, or dining rooms attached to pubs.
The logic of this (or lack of it) may have struck the owners of this newcomer – opposite Covent Garden’s Masonic Temple – many of whom also backed the Anchor & Hope, the most prominent gastropub of recent years. It isn’t a pub at all. But this fact almost seems to have given them cold feet – so what was in former days a bar has been decked out to look like the dining room of a clapped-out boozer.
The great thing about GQS, as opposed to the A&H,is that you can book. The less good thing is that the food is less good. The manifest aim – as is evident the second you look at the A4 Xeroxed menu – is simplicity. Amen to that. Our choice ran crab on toast, beetroot salad, grilled plaice, cherry cake and crème caramel. But with simplicity, you do risk raising the issue: ‘could I make it at home’. And while the answer wasn’t in any case a yes, the skill in evidence by no means made the question absurd. There was none of the sense of genius-at-work in the kitchen that’s made the A&H such a mad success.
But let’s be positive. Prices are modest enough to defuse any serious criticism of the place. And service is very personable. The gastropub revolution has yet to infiltrate the West End properly, and this faux-boozer represents a very respectable start.
