Serious about its whimsy: Sessions Arts Club reviewed

The Sessions Arts Club is a restaurant inside the Old Session House in Clerkenwell, a pale George III building where the criminals of Middlesex were once judged in splendour. It’s common for fine once-public buildings to become private buildings now: the old War Office on Whitehall will be, come summer, Raffles at the OWO. The acronym is not mine – it never is – and I doubt you could run a war from there, though you could try. You could throw a mojito at a laptop. I wonder if there is a connection between the ugliness of the new public buildings and the state of our public discourse: what is there to be proud of but rage?

Yet for every mogul who wants to privatise the government, and every would-be tyrant soothing himself by maiming others, there is a place to hide from their opinions, and the Arts Club is one such, if you can afford it. (It’s £60 a head or thereabouts.) For once the copywriting, which I usually tut at, is accurate: ‘an urban sanctuary’. It claims children cannot be admitted due to the building’s listed status (II*), which I think will be news to the Tower of London (I). If you don’t want children, say so. There is no need to invoke bogus regulations. Even so, it is delicate food delivered with grace and aptitude, and it knows it, and it is necessary to book in advance.

Clerkenwell is an interesting district, the Borough of the north, and what is most interesting – this is common in London – is under your feet. You can ride the old Royal Mail train, which delivered letters across London, and is not yet a branch of the Venice-Simplon-Orient-Express, being tiny. Or, because you are in its valley, you can listen to the River Fleet under drain covers, and wonder if journalists would drown themselves here, if only they could reach it.

The entrance is a mysterious panelled hallway, a bit like the fake library at the entrance to the Batman restaurant Park Row in Soho, which should close for crimes against dining but hasn’t yet. You climb the staircase and find yourself in a space filled with light: the old judges’ dining room. I’m not sure I could eat well being a judge in the late 18th century – Dickens placed his hero Oliver Twist near here, and there was the Bloody Code – but people are weird. The judges’ room is perhaps 40 feet high and pleasingly unkempt: that is, I don’t think the judges would be pleased by it, which is pleasing. There is a gallery lined with what I think is chicken wire, though the chickens are all dead now (not by their own hand), and un-plastered walls, and tall fireplaces and squat chairs and huge Venetian windows, and pot plants and small trees. It is neither preening nor minimalist. If it has an aesthetic, I suppose it is Bruton cottagecore, and there are worse things than that.

The food is by Florence Knight, formerly of Polpetto. It is fresh, seasonal and very simple: the kind of simplicity that is almost impossible to replicate. The shrimp croquette is dense and tasty; the potato, parmesan and pepper is silky, though very slightly undercooked. Lamb chops are almost blue: we eat them with what I would call a medium-smooth mashed potato – some restaurants liquefy potatoes – and a dish of scented mushrooms so glorious I will carry their memory with me. This is a whimsical restaurant, but it is serious about its whimsy, and if you wish to eat where pawnbrokers in souls once dined, it deserves your coin.