To write about restaurants in West London without referencing Clarke’s on Kensington Church Street would be akin to opening a cold bottle of Riesling without one of Sally’s buttery, cayenne-spiked cheese straws to hand – foolish and shortsighted.
Her eponymous restaurant has been quietly serving the great and good of Notting Hill for forty years; that modest, charming and elegantly dressed old friend who is always on reliably good form. To step inside is to be flooded with warmth and familiarity. Even if it’s your first visit, the crisp table linens, impressive Hodgkin, Riley and Freud-adorned walls and nostalgic water glasses from a celebratory dinner with Chez Panisse in 2014 all give the sense of being in the home of a genteel godparent rather than a semi-formal dining room.
Of course, the source of such warmth is Clarke herself, who handed reins in the kitchen over to ex-Harry’s Bar chef Michele Lombardi 10 years ago, but is ‘hardly ever not here’, writing new menus by day and greeting, seating, taking coats and pouring wine by night. The morning we meet, Sally dashes in from across the road, sits me down with a kind smile, ensures I’m well caffeinated and apologises for briefly turning to her phone to top up her parking. ‘I knew there was something I’d forgotten to do…luckily it’s the nice attendant today’.
I can’t help but feel a jobsworthy warden would be well-advised to hold their ticket, with Sally having been a much-loved beacon of the area’s eclectic and ever-changing community for four decades. Guests range from besuited gents enjoying Bordeaux-oiled business lunches and nervous young professionals meeting their potential mother-in-law for the first time over a bowl of risotto to tourists, writers, actors and friends. ‘Luckily, we’ve never been a cliquey restaurant. We’ve always had a lovely mix of people, never just the American bankers or the Kensington ladies who lunch. So long may that last.’
Artists are also an important and colourful cohort within the Clarke’s dining alumnus. I comment on the vast Grayson Perry hanging to the right as you enter the restaurant and Sally cheerfully tells me, ‘He called in the other week on his bicycle for lunch’. Lucian Freud’s last head and shoulder portrait was of Sally herself – a regular she remembers as fondly for his daily breakfast of ‘revolting-looking milky Earl Grey tea, pink grapefruit juice and the most enormous pain au raisin’ as she does for the time he whacked a very snooty Kensington lady on the backside with a baguette as he left, ‘because she was very rude to him. That’s just how he was.’
Diners aside, a cursory flick through Clarke’s new book, In Season for Forty Years, reveals how her heartfelt approach to hospitality has won the loyalty of those on the other side of the pass too. Interspersed between stories from regulars including Paul Smith, Patricia Hodge and ‘lovely Julia Samuel’ are chapters generously dedicated to suppliers and members of staff past and present. ’They’re part of the building blocks. We simply wouldn’t be where we are now without their contribution. We run it as a family really.’ And it must be a pretty happy one if retaining the same kitchen porter for 35 years is anything to go by.
Another mainstay over that period has been the philosophy behind the iconic Clarke’s ‘no-choice menu’, shaped by a childhood of weekends reading Elizabeth David books and summers spent driving through France on family holidays. ‘We’d have supper at little roadside cafés where Madame would cook the same meal for her guests as she had for her family. I remember thinking so clearly that only one menu can really showcase what’s best on the day. It was the only way I wanted to do it.’ Although now very much the norm, such unwavering faith in seasonality and traceability was pioneering – even controversial – when it was introduced to the somewhat staid British dining scene in 1984. Surely an illuminating moment for a country Raymond Blanc once described in culinary terms as ‘the dark hole of Europe’.
Sally still changes her menus daily, with every lunch and dinner evolving to the rhythm of nature. ‘We’re still totally focused on what is right for the day, right for the season and what the growers are sending us. The ingredients themselves speak to me.’ The autumn day we chat heralds the arrival of the first purple figs – half of which communicate a delicious desire to be roasted with olive oil, sea salt and summer savory and served alongside pigeon as a main course, and the other half tucked into a salad starter with cobnuts. At £38 for three courses, the set lunch menu is one of London’s best kept secrets – and a surefire way to enjoy properly excellent produce at the very peak of its season. ‘I’m always taking menus away with me to pick up new ideas’, Clarke adds. If another London restaurant has suddenly got peas on the menu and I haven’t been offered them yet by our supplier, I get quite cross and get straight on the phone to find out why.’
While the Clarkes ethos has been consistent, the restaurant has had to adapt to weather the ever-changing and uncertain storm that is the hospitality industry. From the ‘nightmare’ of hiring staff in a post-Covid and Brexit era and more health-conscious, veg-focussed dining habits to the skyrocketing cost of ingredients – ‘I can’t see when or how that will end’ – she’s seen it all over the last 40 years. And yet despite these challenges and a self-confessed proclivity to ‘hide our light under a bushel a bit. We’ve never been very shouty’, Sally’s businesses continue to grow. Their sister wholesale company, Notting Hill Bakery, supplies Eurostar and Bayley and Sage and has just re-opened Sally’s shop on Westbourne Grove. Across the road from the restaurant, her Campden Street shop’s shelves are stacked with freshly baked breads and pastries – plus all the Clarke’s classics no self-respecting West London pantry would be without, including hand-rolled chocolate truffles, oatmeal biscuits for cheese, bars of honey and pistachio nut nougat, and those chicken, mushroom and leek pies ‘that people talk about quite a lot’.
The restaurant is preparing a number of celebratory dinners to mark its 40th anniversary later this year, so as we look back at her career, I ask Sally what advice she would have given herself on that opening day in 1984. ‘One would be don’t do it, and the other would be to give yourself a time limit to walk away.’ She admits she has no idea where that point is for her, ‘while we’re still relevant, we just keep going’. And we’re all the luckier for it, as there comes a moment in every person’s life when you find yourself in need of a dining experience that fills your heart as much as your stomach – whether heartbroken, homesick or simply yearning for a little TLC. Clarke’s supplies this by the bucketload, perhaps best summed up by the following note found pencilled on the linen napkin of a diner earlier this year, ‘Sally, when I am in London, I consider a meal with you to be the definition of home’.
