Origin City, London: ‘screamingly butch’ restaurant review

There is a cinematic convention in the oeuvre of William Hanna and Joseph Barbera that a bulldog can be led blindly into almost any terrible peril by a piece of meat dangled from a fishing rod by a mischievous tomcat. I mention this because it sums up how I felt when I read about Origin City, a restaurant on the edge of Smithfield market where, and here comes the main selling point, “We only use our own Black Angus cattle from our family farm, and we use every part of every beast.” I’m a slow-moving omnivore and proud of it, but a line like that makes me react like a mako shark when you pour a bucket of guts over the side of the boat.

It’s a big, airy space and the staff are instantly welcoming. The front part of the room is designed, how to put this, well it’s Scottish Baronial interpreted by someone who’s good at large yachts. Discreetly tartanned, but lacking the authenticating hint of dust and damp Labrador. The dining room is dominated by a reproduction of one of the Lascaux cave paintings depicting, I want to say, “aurochs”? The theme is elaborated with a collection of basketwork, some pleasantly phallic pottery and an acreage of neutral fabrics and wall treatments.

Origin City, says another page of the multi-part menu, “combines British fine dining and old family traditions . . . We use only pasture-raised and organic traditional heritage breeds — Black Aberdeen Angus, Large Black and Tamworth outdoor-reared pigs, and Texel lamb — from our family farm in Argyll, Scotland . . . Our seafood comes from our sister aquafarm, Loch Fyne Oysters, and in keeping with our ethos, our wine list also features many wines from our own organic family vineyard, in Provence.”

Sometimes I feel I should apologise for being British — class-conscious to a fault, status-obsessed, deferential — but every atom of me is now screaming, “So what is this nameless farming/landowning/fishing and winemaking family?”

There’s an enormous plate of Scottish langoustines which have somehow been diverted from Spain, where most of them end up. The only thing that can go wrong with world-class crustacea is if anyone buggers around with the preparation or strays too far from lemon/butter/garlic. They don’t. This is simple, straight-down-the-line respect for ingredients and I want to go out into Smithfield and yell about it to City boys standing outside pubs.

A plate of charcuterie is, surprisingly, not made “on our family farm in Umbria” but merely “in-house” and is little short of miraculous. There’s a cured Tamworth loin with a 3cm fat layer that I want my body wrapped in before burial and some coppa that easily stands up against the best I’ve consumed in Italy, though I’ll get stabbed in the neck for saying so.

The grilled morteau sausage with Puy lentils completely did my head in. The garlicky sausage was smoked, not in the smokehouse on some far-flung family island, but just downstairs. The lentils were fully “de-vegetablised”. The rigid orthodoxies of the Mediterranean diet demand that lentils be boiled and lightly dressed, but the guys butchering in the basement must have a superfluity of bones and trim and they make a “glace” so thick you could use it to glue tiles to a space shuttle. This mahogany-coloured gloop is stirred through the lentils so they take on the characteristics of a gorgeous beef mince. I took a bitter leaf salad, dressed with “Dijonaise” to cut the richness, which, though splendid, wasn’t up to the brief. That would take a plasma torch.

Twenty-five hour stout-braised Black Angus beef was an absolute bloody unit. A cube of meat about one-quarter the size of a house brick, cooked just short of sublimation. The only thing holding it together on the plate was a thorough enrobing with another highly reduced glace. A triumph of engineering.

The “Black pig cut of the day” sounds like a hazing ceremony on a pirate ship but, on my day at least, was a simple loin. It was cooked just beyond medium-rare and came with a very good fennel sausage, a faggot of assorted pig components and a blameless and quite fresh summer bean casserole.

This is screamingly butch cooking, so I feared for the desserts. I needn’t have. They’re obviously sufficiently old-school here to have a pastry chef and it showed. Restaurants only kept Eton Mess on the menu so we could make jokes about the government, so it’s time for an update. At Origin City, it comes without rough chunks of meringue and the homogenous texture of an emollient custard. I’m sure there’s a blinding piece of satire to be extracted from rough chunks and emollient custard, but I think we’ve all had enough politics. Lemon sherbet was a wee mousse, cowrin’ under a Scottish oatcake and studded with cubes of lemon drizzle sponge. A strong finale showing real creativity.

I can’t say that Origin City doesn’t trouble me. There were so many weird quirks in the set-up; the decor, the odd drilled precision of the service. The strange narrative of the “Family”, who turn out to be the Landsbergs, a British/Russian/Ukrainian family based predominantly in Luxembourg who decline to give their first names to press. Even the name Origin City seems to lack some bit of punctuation that’s beyond my talents to identify. A glueing together of expensive components where the overarching aesthetic is just faintly askew.

And yet, and yet. The food is superb. The ingredients are amazing. The craft skills in the kitchen are matchless, and what arrives on the plate is a celebration of delight in both things.

Follow Tim @TimHayward and email him at tim.hayward@ft.com

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