Theatres and restaurants can have a lot in common: they’re both about putting on a show and nourishment for the body and soul. And just as a theatre has a producer, there’s the restaurateur whose passion finds the funding for it and co-ordinates everything that happens under the restaurant’s roof; the chef is akin to the director, mixing and stirring the ingredients; they even both have a script (or menu) and set designer (or interior decorator).
I tend to treat food a bit functionally myself: my bulk will tell you that I enjoy it, but I don’t tend to make a production of it (certainly not at home, where my kitchen is hardly ever put into use!). But on Sunday I was taken to a restaurant in Wapping that blew my mind and is an entire production it itself.
It’s the food equivalent of Punchdrunk’s Faust that happened just up the road from it last year, namely a kind of a site-specific, installation project where the quirky theatricality begins before you even enter it: the ancient tree outside is festooned with bright yellow umbrellas.
Wapping Food, as it is called, is housed within the Wapping Project, a disused ydraulic power station that former Royal Court and Liverpool Playhouse director Jules Wright first found for a show in 1993 – and then raised £4million to buy and convert into a venue that is part excellent restaurant, part art gallery site.
She was on hand on Sunday, as I’m told she always is, delivering bread to the table personally, and happy to talk about her bold career departure: she told us how she cast around for her first chef by treating it like she was auditioning actors, going to restaurants where they were working and trying their food for herself. She’s devoted herself entirely to the place, and though she admits that she misses working with actors, she satisfies some of her creative urges by creating her own art installations in the atmospheric (i.e. chilly!) basement, that right now is a wintry autumnal environment with a constantly ringing phone box at the middle of it that delivers a personal message to every visitor when you pick it up. (Don’t miss another installation on top of the building either, which has a boat floating on a rooftop lake to the accompaniment of the shipping forecast).
The huge main hall where the restaurant (and tiny, visible kitchen) is sited still has relics of its past life visible, but here a different sort of power is now generated: that of satisfied customers eating fantastic food (including the best panacotta dessert I have ever tasted). No wonder locals like Steven Berkoff and Helen Mirren are smitten, and Rosemary Squire, president of SOLT, calls it her favourite restaurant. So do Stuart and Hilary Williams, generous benefactors to theatres like the National, Donmar and Almeida, whose guest I was on Sunday; last year, Hilary produced her first musical on her own account, Laurence Mark Wythe’s Tomorrow Morning, giving a much needed boost to a new British writing talent. We need more people like her that put their money where my mouth often is: espousing the cause of British musicals.
Mixing food and theatre, of course, is the mission of the Menier Chocolate Factory, who in three fast years have established themselves as one of London’s most enterprising theatrical venues, with two West End transfers already to their name and now a third to follow next month when their revival of Patrick Marber’s poker game play Dealers’s Choice, transfers to the Trafalgar Studios, shortly followed by the Broadway incarnation of another Menier production, Sunday in the Park with George, opening in New York in January. Now they’ve achieved something else: they managed to get the usually theatre-shy restaurant critic of The Guardian, Matthew Norman, to visit. It helps that he’s a poker player himself (and good friend of the playwright), but in over two years of being a good friend of his wife Rebecca Tyrrel and son Louis, we have still not met. I have even taken to referring to him as the Phantom Matthew in e-mails with Rebecca. In Matthew’s review of the Menier restaurant in Saturday’s Guardian, he noted that the play is itself set in a London restaurant, and asked, “Will life never cease to impersonate art impersonating life?”
Matthew is threatening to go back to see (some of) their next show, La Cage Aux Folles — when it finally opens, that is. An announcement was made at the end of last week that the first three previews had been cancelled – owing to a series of illnesses amongst the cast – but somehow this has translated into a ten-day delay on the press performance, which will now be on a Thursday matinee. No doubt earlier evening performances are all booked up with other press nights already – but since there’s a lot of doubling-up going on around then as it is, it wouldn’t make much difference to add another. But the really annoying thing, and its something that Matthew would no doubt sympathise with, is that we’ll be robbed of our usual pre-theatre dinner now. Theatre critics are a hungry bunch, and we don’t usually get time to eat out much. The Menier was a rare oasis that allowed us to have our cake (and more) and eat it, before the show.
