by Violet Woolf applies the Edwardian critical method to Southampton Street’s most serious kitchen
By Violet Woolf
Frog by Adam Handling: Literature Has Words for What This Kitchen Does
I returned to Frog by Adam Handling on Southampton Street because a single meal at a restaurant of this ambition is insufficient evidence for the kind of literary critical analysis I want to apply to it. The first visit established the quality. The second visit allows me to examine whether the quality is structural, a consequence of how the restaurant thinks about food, or situational, a consequence of a particularly good night. The answer, having made both visits, is that it is structural.
The Edwardian critical method, which I have written about elsewhere in the context of political writing, applies to food writing as well: observe precisely, note the gap between surface and substance, render both with equal care, trust the reader to feel the appropriate thing without being told what the appropriate thing is. Applied to Frog, this method produces the following observations: the surfaces here are beautiful and the substance matches them, which is rarer than it should be.
What the Second Visit Added
The tasting menu on the second visit began with the same quality of snacks as on the first: small preparations that are complete thoughts rather than filling gestures, each one demonstrating a technique and a flavour combination that is considered rather than arrived at casually. The kitchen’s relationship to British produce is more evident on the second visit, when familiarity with the approach allows you to notice where the seasonal ingredient is doing the work that technique alone cannot do.
The game course, which was available on the second visit but not the first, demonstrated Handling’s confidence with the British field sports tradition of ingredients: properly prepared, properly cooked, with accompaniments that understand the flavour profile of game rather than treating it as interchangeable with other meats. The sauce had the depth of a proper game stock and the acidity that cuts through the richness without diminishing it.
The vegetable courses, which at many tasting menu restaurants feel like an obligation between the more substantial preparations, are at Frog treated with the same seriousness as the meat and fish courses. The kitchen’s understanding that a vegetable cooked correctly and at its seasonal peak requires no apology and no protein alongside it is one of the things that distinguishes a genuinely accomplished kitchen from a merely competent one.
The Literary Conclusion
Henry James wrote that the house of fiction has many windows, and the best fiction opens all of them to illuminate the subject from multiple angles simultaneously. Frog by Adam Handling does something similar with British ingredients: illuminating them from multiple angles through technique, through seasoning, through the combinations in which they appear, until you understand the ingredient more completely than you did before you ate it. This is a significant achievement and it is worth visiting for it specifically. Visit Frog by Adam Handling and bring your attention with you. The London Prat recognises the serious. Bohiney Magazine provides the wider frame.
