Yahoo News The Clock House, Surrey, restaurant review: great things can come from trouble and strife
Whenever my daughter and I go through Woking on the train, which we do quite often at the moment, I try to get her to look at the town’s best building, the Shah Jahan Mosque, the first purpose-built place of Islamic worship in the UK. It’s a storybook slice of 19th-century Moghul-style opulence, with a blowsy onion dome, cusped horseshoe arches and all the trimmings. But she’s having none of it. “FACT ALERT!” she bellows, eyes theatrically stoppered with the heels of her hands, head corkscrewed away from the window.
Sometimes I try to trick her, pretending there’s a unicorn grazing outside the carriage, or droning on about G W Leitner’s Oriental Institute while looking in the wrong direction. Nothing doing. We’ve been to Open House, the annual architecture festival, a couple of times: it was a nightmare of heel-dragging, horse-trading and flouncy fits – and she wasn’t much better.
Said daughter being mysteriously unavailable, her stepmother joined me for dinner near Woking last week. The three-mile minicab ride took place in darkness, so we didn’t get to see Shah Jahan in all its glory (nor, I should point out in the interests of ecumenicalism, did we take the brief diversion I'd intended to ask for in order to check out the ruined Augustinian priory at Newark).
The village of Ripley is about as pretty as it could be, given that it’s sliced in two by what clearly used to be the A3. It is rumoured that local legend Paul “the Modfather” Weller (whose mother, Ann, once worked as a cleaner at Shah Jahan, incidentally) has a studio nearby. There’s plenty of half-timbering, and a few grand Georgian houses, one containing The Clock House, which is indeed adorned with a large clock – so there’s no excuse for being late.
This time last year, The Clock House was known as Drake’s, after the couple who ran it along with the Anchor over the road. Then, calamity struck. I’ve been piecing the story together from local news website Getsurrey.co.uk, which has been following the story with a faintly unsettling zeal. Steve and Serina Drake split up; Steve handed sole ownership of Drake’s to Serina in a divorce settlement; a former chef de partie called Fred Clapperton took over from Steve as head chef while Steve planned a bright future in Dorking; the Michelin inspectors took their star away; the restaurant was renamed (the clock was already there). In its new guise, it’s recently got its star back.
It’s like something out of Dynasty - or one of those Greek myths about how someone’s leg gets chopped off and thrown in the sea, and then turns into a nymph. But would our dinner at The Clock House be the stuff of legend?
Servers were eager in a sober, suave and vaguely sorrowful way, like a trailblazing firm of undertakers
Early auguries were mixed. It’s a handsome dining room, done out in expensive mushroomy neutrals, but faintly bleak and – on a midweek evening – far from full. Staff were expert and suave, eager in a sober and vaguely sorrowful way, like a trailblazing firm of undertakers. Outside, the traffic whistled by in the light rain of the evening.
We ordered à la carte – there’s a tempting tasting menu, but at £75 plus £55 for a wine flight per head it’s not one to be undertaken lightly. Rapidly, the food – and the enthusiasm of our sommelier – topped up our depleted serotonin levels.
It’s of that Michelin-friendly, seasonal, broadly modern British stamp that is in danger of becoming a bit of a cliché in this country, certainly in “destination” restaurants outside London; but it’s done with real gusto. There is maybe less emphasis on presentation – chef hadn’t obviously resorted tweezers to arrange our dishes – in fact, a weird kind of simplicity shone through.
Cured sea trout was paired with a crunchy oyster beignet – effectively, a po’boy – topped with a crispy cabbage leaf and dressed with dill. Belly pork, as soft as tofu, came with celeriac and a forest-green Alexander (aka horse parsley) purée. Beef (prime rib, we guessed) was served with a headily rich little brick of sweetbreads, trompettes de mort and discs of kohlrabi; turbot with shredded chicken wing meat, sliced porcini, baby turnips and miso.
All the Michelin stuff was in order: the napkins as thick as shoe leather, the amuse-bouches on tap
Everything somehow tasted of autumn – and everything, to borrow my illustrious predecessor Matthew Norman’s core criterion for good food, tasted of itself: the only slight bum note was the fierce saltiness of the chicken. All the Michelin stuff was in order, too, if you like that sort of thing: the napkins as thick as shoe leather, the amuse-bouches on tap.
Our wine was a VDP from the Loire made from local côt grapes, on the low-rent side of the list at £30 but fresh and versatile. Cheese was unpasteurised, well-kept and plentiful. We shared a pudding of “Medjool dates, walnuts, caramel” which seemed to look forward to Christmas.
While we’d been eating, the chilly half-empty room had blossomed into life, like one of those computer animations where they take a ruined house in Pompeii and bring the colour back to the walls. We paid – a fairly bracing sum, it has to be said – and left, after a bit of taxi kerfuffle, wishing everyone well in their new incarnation – even Steve, over there in the wilds of Dorking.
The Clock House, High Street, Ripley, Surrey, GU23 6AQ 01483 224777; theclockhouserestaurant.co.uk
dinner for two £200
