‘I’m sorry but it doesn’t work’

I’ve been trying to get to Bistro Freddie for most of my life, or at least it feels that way. I don’t have some kind of paranoid delusion that it’s trying to evade me, it’s just that I’ve been trying to organise a review for ages. I’ve booked tables and then, in the way we’re all empowered now by the tech, I’ve cancelled them when something more important came up.

I’ve loved classic French brasserie cooking since childhood, since someone gave me my first beaten paperback of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume Two (with the 18-page baguette recipe). When French food went through an unfashionable phase, I kept my enthusiasm quiet and then, when a great renaissance was bruited from the direction of Hackney, I joyfully embraced my lost love.

Your mum told me that Freddie’s was great. Or if she didn’t, she was the only one. It seemed the entire culinary world was squealing of its bijou, romantic authenticity. Last night I finally made it.

It’s on a strange little junction in Shoreditch, in the space previously occupied by Oklova, which served a simple Turkish/Mediterranean menu from an open kitchen. The basic set-up remains unchanged, but Freddie’s is offering a menu of bistro classics that should bring me to my knees.

Their own sausage, pig-head croquette, chicken liver parfait, monkfish dieppoise, grilled bavette, chicken jambonette, chips and mayo, a promisingly simple martini and îles flottantes, all handwritten in that specially florid French way. Where do London restaurants get that done? Do they have to hire someone French or is a single writer zooming around the capital on a scooter with a smart little satchel full of biros? Actually, I like this. I’m pitching it to Netflix.

We know each other well enough that I don’t need to make excuses about steak tartare. I’m like The Inquisition. I have a quasi-religious calling to judge all tartares and denounce those found wanting. Which, deo gratias, this one wasn’t. Hand-chopped, big, irregular cuboids of steak, not hung to any degree of funk. Micro cornichons in dolly-little slices. Capers smaller than nonpareil sugar balls, possibly subatomic. Sufficient egg and seasonings, but it was what any competent pothole-filler would have recognised as an aggregate-heavy “dry mix”.

I took the wild duck à l’orange partly because — “Jesus! Seriously?” — I can’t resist it when chefs wheel out classics. But also, it was my first wild duck of the year. God, I love them. They remind me of duck hunting as a boy. Rising before dawn, and striding out across our estate with my dear late father. Through the mist on the 42 bus to the local park, with a bag of stale breadcrumbs and an old five-iron.

Nobody should order wild duck with any delusions. It’s going to be wiry, muscled like a fell-runner. If it had a good last day on the pond, you might get hints of fish, larvae or mud. In this case, it was a diminutive leg and a breast, cut into thick medallions. The breast was served rare. That, I could handle.

The leg didn’t appear to have been treated any differently, and there’d been no attempt to remove tendons during the butchery, so it was much like chewing a three-inch length of warm armoured cable. The sauce was properly orangey and based on a good demi-glace, but oversalted and served on a cold plate. I have about as much time for people who whinge about cold plates as I do for those who automatically call out 30 per cent of wine as “corked”, but when the sauce is that reduced, it cools and becomes unpalatable faster than a bag of McDonald’s fries. Within nanoseconds it clung to the moustache like meat glue.

What sort of barbarian could resist a Comté polenta? Not me. It was rich and well-cheesed, but they’d chosen the pale white, fine-grained variety, so anyone expecting the toothsome grit of an Italian polenta would have been unpleasantly surprised by a “hot blancmange” effect. A faintly untrustworthy suavity.

Do I have space to exercise my hobby horse about bagged salads? I know leaf washing is an utter PITA in restaurant kitchens and that environmental health regulations turn the whole area of salad prep into a minefield. That’s why suppliers offer bags of pre-washed, picked and sorted salad. The difficulty is that the curation of leaves doesn’t vary. Oakleaf, mâche, baby spinach and those irritating red-spined beetroot leaves, a couple of bits of romaine. It looks exactly the same as the bag you’d buy in Tesco, for one very good reason.

I know it shouldn’t bug me so much, but it’s just so disappointing when a kitchen puts out a plate of something that basically says “we couldn’t be bothered”. A fresh, original green salad, prepared in-house, telegraphs care and effort. Otherwise, they’re just inviting you to get judgy about their dressing. Which while not paradigm-shifting, was effective leaf lube.

The waiter was keen to steer me towards sticky toffee pudding or chocolate tart, but they always feel like indulgence ill-spent. At least îles flottantes give you a punchline. My single sceptred île was moulded, cold and set in a sea of frigid crème Anglaise. Honestly. I need another 200 words just for the Brexit gags.

London’s French renaissance has given us places like Casse-Croûte, where the authenticity is effortless and total, and Café François, where the canon is subverted and thrillingly developed. Freddie’s is, sadly, neither. I’ve got a theory here. For hundreds of years, the French have run bistros on a system. A particular kind of very traditional but very efficient kitchen. At Bistro Freddie, they’re trying to produce the same menu in a reduced, “London open-counter” set-up, better suited to mezze, tapas or small plates. I’m sorry, but it doesn’t work.