The menu below actually reveals nothing about why this lunch was so special. A clue appears in the three words under Blacklock, the Soho basement restaurant that provided the copious food and drink, and the rather particular address where it took place: In the Park! Lincoln’s Inn Fields, WC2A 3TL and the date, 27 August 2016, which was a Saturday.
Nor does this menu mention the ultimate beneficiaries of my brother’s generosity in bidding for the lunch in a charity auction (we were merely his guests, a party of ten in total), nor all the hard work put into making the lunch so special, work seemingly effortlessly executed by the entire, principally tattooed Blacklock team led by its ever-smiling owner, Gordon Ker.
And yet this menu has very special attributes. The first was that it was a significant part of an auction led by the UK hospitality industry to raise much-needed funds for Action Against Hunger, and in this particular case was bid for to the tune of £565 by my generous brother and sister-in-law. It was part of an eBay auction held earlier in the year and, as so often with these prizes, the most difficult aspect was finding a suitable date in everyone’s diary.
But perhaps the most relevant aspect of the whole lunch for me was the use of the menu as a fundraising tool, an often-overlooked attribute of what I am currently describing as ‘the world’s favourite piece of paper’. This statement is the subtitle to my forthcoming book On The Menu to be published by Unbound on 3 November 2016. And one of the 11 chapters that sits alongside The Origins of the Menu and Planning the Menu, a section that includes interviews with 12 of the top chefs from around the world that range from René Redzepi of Noma to Ruth Rogers of London’s River Cafe to April Bloomfield of New York’s The Spotted Pig, is a chapter that deals with just this topic: the menu as fundraiser.
This particular chapter covers a wide variety of the many uses to which menus have been put in order to raise money for good causes. From one of the oldest, the Pizza Veneziana, which Peter Boizot, then the owner of Pizza Express, established in 1977 and has so far raised over £2 million for Venice’s defences against the encroaching sea; to the ‘Burma Burger’, which Shaun Searley, the chef at our son’s The Quality Chop House, created before he embarked on a madcap 250-mile cycle ride across Myanmar for Action Against Hunger and raised over £1,000; and the uses that John Wood, the CEO of Room to Read, puts good food and wine to, to raise money for this extremely worthy cause.
One factor seems to be common to all these endeavours despite the wide divergence in the ultimate beneficiaries. That is the sheer enthusiasm of all those who are providing the hospitality. The maxim that ‘if a job is worth doing, it is worth doing well’ was certainly borne out by all the staff from Blacklock. There were so many of them on duty that as we approached the location – easily distinguished by the presence of their Green Egg barbecue – it took us a couple of minutes to work out who were the chefs and waiting staff and who were the guests. There seemed to be equal numbers of both.
And they were certainly generous with the food, the beers and the cocktails, as Jenny Quan’s photographs make clear. As we stood in the shade of a magnificent plane tree making small talk, their staff circulated with plates of large nibbles and various drinks that sounded fairly innocuous – Grandma’s Spiked Lemonade and an Aperol Spritz – but were fairly potent. Meanwhile, the fulsome menu pictured above lurked under everyone’s place setting at the nearby table.
They opened with sliders, that smaller version of a hamburger depicted above right, but the plural referred to the fact that there were two different sorts. These were then followed by a large plate of lamb cutlets with a green sauce; maple-cured bacon chops; and two plates overflowing with recently barbecued porterhouse and prime rib steak (see above). Accompanying these were ash-roasted sweet potatoes, a heritage tomato salad, a salad of kale and Parmesan, and a mound of grilled flatbread.
It was now well past three o’clock and I was cooking grouse that night. Most unfortunately it was time to go, so we missed the delicious-looking cheesecake. But there was just enough time to congratulate Blacklock on a tremendous team effort; to thank my brother for being so generous; and for wishing Action Against Hunger every success in their never-ending battle to ensure that enough nutritious food and clean water manages to reach the world’s ever-growing population.
Blacklock, The Basement, 24 Great Windmill Street, Soho, London W1D 7LG
