There is a wonderful cognitive dissonance to Bistro Aix. It thinks it is in Paris but it is really in Crouch End, the flatter twin to Muswell Hill, a district so charismatic it had its own serial killer in Dennis Nilsen. (He killed more people in Willesden, but Willesden doesn’t receive its due: here or anywhere.)
We pick our way through the Versailles of north London, past Little Waitrose and the clock tower
I have never thrived in Paris. My sister says I always go with the wrong men, which is unfair, because it was a school trip and I had no choice about the (very small) men. I prefer the Paris of my imagination, which is quite a lot like Bistro Aix in Crouch End.
I love the grubbiness of Crouch End, which no moronic gentrification or French restaurant of any quality – and Bistro Aix has quality – can scrub out. It’s a desolate piece of north London, but everything is relative. My Polish grandmother lived near here, in Avenue Road, and Crouch End is Versailles when you consider what the Nazis did to Lodz. (Lodz. Not Lolz.) There is a Gail’s bakery, which I forgive since it has become a bready symbol of Zionist Organised Government (ZOG) in danger of being chased out of Walthamstow by idiots before it arrives. They are fools. ZOG pork sausage rolls are rather good and if that confounds the ZOG critics – well, what doesn’t?
I thought I should review a suburban restaurant, because one cannot snipe at the monied indefinitely, and if I like a suburban restaurant I cannot keep it all to myself. (I recommend the Paradise on South End Green, Hampstead. That is my only secret.)
So at lunchtime in gasping heat, my handsome nephew and I pick our way through the streets of north London, past Little Waitrose and the clock tower. Bistro Aix is beautiful, and I admire the breadth of its ambition, and its denial of the reality of Crouch End: but this is what a good restaurant does. It sits in its red-brick parade with a mass of restaurant-guide plaudits stuck in the window. The exterior is all in black, like Adrian Mole’s bedroom. Inside there are pale yellow walls and red ceilings; wooden floors; stained-glass windows; a metal boat containing succulents; good – though strange – art. (A painting including chefs and a winged horse. In these tableaux the chef is Mr Benn walking through history.) I am tired of restaurants that look like barns. Bistro Aix has made an effort, though Crouch End seems resistant: it is very quiet.
This restaurant is chef-owned and chef-beloved: the food is glorious. We eat batter-fried courgette ribbons with parmesan and lemon (£8); pan-seared foie gras with roasted cherries and toasted brioche (£25); grass-fed sirloin with roast potatoes, carrots, turnips, thyme jus, Yorkshire puddings (£25 again, and I would have paid more); rare rib-eye steak with tarragon butter and frites (£32); home-made toffee ice-cream with pecans, honeycomb and toffee sauce (£8); seasonal fruit pavlova with vanilla whipped cream and a berry coulis (£8).
This is rare food, and I suggest you rush to Crouch End for it. I didn’t eat this well in Lasserre in Paris itself (wrong man, wrong-ish food). Bistro Aix outdoes Chef Roux at the Langham – it gifts its diners windows too – and is a fair match for Pavyllon at the Four Seasons on Park Lane. The pavlova in particular will stay with me, and, in its honour, I am moved enough to paraphrase Casablanca. We’ll always have Crouch End.
Bistro Aix, 54 Topsfield Parade, Tottenham Ln, London N8 8PT; tel: 020 8340 6346.
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