A great-day-out cafe that’s good value: Kenwood House reviewed

The immaculate bourgeois socialists of north London – that is not code for Jews – like to eat and drink in the former servants’ quarters of Kenwood House, because this is a mad country.

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Kenwood is beautiful. It is Hampstead’s best house, standing at the top of the heath, near the head waters of the River Fleet, the river of the journalists. Further down the hill the immaculate bourgeois socialists gambol in the swimming ponds, which is apparently a fashionable thing to do. I prefer the lido, but I am not afraid of working-class teenagers.

Hampstead Heath is an excitable woodland. There was a what-is-a-woman debate at the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond last year (a Terf was banned) and at West Heath there is now a battle between dog-walkers and gay cruisers so bloody it was in the Daily Mail. Dog-walkers are patrolling a site famous for gay cruising – the Shag Tree – trying to make cruisers go indoors. The cruisers say the Shag Tree is part of their culture and they won’t be forced indoors by dog-walkers and their stupid familiars. All this is the wages of affluence. They have time for such battles.

When the immaculate bourgeois socialists have exhausted themselves fighting, they head to Kenwood House to eat in the servants’ quarters and brew house. The house is pale, long and exquisite. Its proudest hour was surviving the 1780 Gordon Riots when the butler handed out free wine at the Spaniards Inn, thus delaying the rioters, and it was gifted to the nation by the 1st Earl of Iveagh in 1927. It houses Rembrandt’s ‘Self-Portrait with Two Circles’ – my favourite of all Rembrandts – and Vermeer’s ‘The Guitar Player’, who, like all Vermeer’s women, looks simple. (I do not trust Vermeer.) Kenwood is so grand it appeared in the film Notting Hill, and it is a rare example of Notting Hill, a district with its own implacable myths, looking elsewhere for anything. This led to a similar cinematic love letter to London – the absurd film Hampstead – but the leads were uglier, it was possibly too north London – that is code for Jews – and it sank. I love Kenwood because watching immaculate bourgeois socialists queuing to eat in the servants’ quarters of an aristocratic house makes me howl with laughter. But that is class and Britain. No one is immune.

The mushroom soup is glorious – perfectly seasoned and profound

There is solace. The Stewards Room (once the servants’ dining room) is takeout only, but the Brew House café is very fine: high-ceilinged and whitewashed brick, with aristocratic-style bushes outside. I have never walked its stone floors without happiness. The food is also – and this is a surprise to me, having been robbed and poisoned by a thousand British great-day-out cafés – very good, and well-priced. The Sunday roast – a choice of beef or chicken, and I took beef – is not as good as at the Audley Public House, for instance, but it is in no way offensive, and it is under £20. The mushroom soup, however, is glorious – perfectly seasoned and profound, for soup – and mushroom soup is a riot in itself: that is, it can go either way. The cake – coffee, chocolate, lemon – is only adequate but the punters devour it anyway, because they have been fighting.

Kenwood does not troll its visitors the same way that, say, Chatsworth does – it is not filled with photographs of dukes promising lifelong friendship for a monthly direct debit – but it offers the same heartbreak. This is not yours, and it never will be. Now give us money, and you shall have cake.