A magical field hospital for vegetables: Turnips reviewed

Turnips is an haute cuisine restaurant inside a greengrocer in Borough Market in London. I suspect others will try this conceit soon — it is the sort of dishonest fantasy affluent anti-vax mothers enjoy as they peddle their oblivious self-hatred on smartphones made of minerals hewn by child slaves — but not like this. Turnips is indisputably magical. Perhaps I say this because it is almost completely outdoors but still warm. These are mad times, even for mad times.

Borough is a good place to feel the throb of the ancient city; but particularly now. It has the toughness and ennui of a district that says: global pandemic, kids? What else you got? Look at late-capitalist masculine inadequacy disguised as a skyscraper called the Shard. What else you got? Look at the replica of the Golden Hinde, the pinnacle of 16th-century luxe yachting and still it had Rattus rattus. What else you got? Look at Laurence Fox forming a political movement from the ashes of Lewis and Whatever Love Means: What else you got? I then imagine Borough burping in contempt and wiping its mouth. It isn’t quite as comforting as eating by the sign in Weymouth that says ‘Bubonic plague was here’ (I paraphrase). But almost.

Turnips is in a vast cavern under a railway arch painted white and held up by gaudy green poles: it is cosy, various and brightly lit. It has a thrown-together kitchen; tables among pumpkins that seem to glint; stores on vast shelves overhead. It looks like a field hospital for root vegetables that cooked haute cuisine by mistake, or despite itself, or through some mad enchantment summoned by despair. It is the antithesis of the wealth aesthetic that painted every-thing first beige and then — as if beige was too mercurial — grey.