The Daily Telegraph
William Sitwell took one look at the menu at this riverside pub conversion and declared, rather puzzlingly, “There’s absolutely nothing I want… maybe they’ve got some chips”. Exactly what caused him to behave more like a fussy 12-year-old than a food-loving (you would hope) fully grown restaurant reviewer is hard to tell: “pickled cucumber”, “curried scallop”, “fennel, datterini, mascarpone”, “escalivada, butterbeans, goat’s curd”, “duck mince, celeriac, olives, toast” – all par for the course, surely, at a vaguely ambitious London restaurant.
Perhaps it was a fake protest, to set up a punchline: “My revolting-sounding duck mince was a staggeringly flavourful mess… the sort of dish you’d tramp through deep snow for: comforting, warm and a revelation of enticing taste.”
Perhaps William didn’t like the unfamiliar foreign words: ‘escalivada’ turned out to be “a plate of room-temperature roasted veg – peppers, aubergines etc… [that] was magnificently rich and pure, a real treasure chest of flavour”, while stracci pasta of mushroom and potato was “almost a carb dish of the year”.
So there you have it: “The Waterman’s Arms is a grower. It’s like a Coldplay song that you try not to like but end up, seduced by the chorus, singing from the rooftops.”
William Sitwell - 2024-10-20
