How Long Can This Restaurant Remain a Secret?
Louise Benson reviews Parinaz Mogadassi and Peter Doig’s Tramps Bar, 'a pretty good place to be'. Photographs by Dashti Jahfar.
Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants.
A reminder that tomorrow morning we will be hosting our annual talk at the British Library Food Season! This year, the subject is food photography and how it has evolved since the 1970s, from the gloss and artifice of early studio shoots, to the chaotic and online visual food culture we have today. To speak about this, we have assembled a panel of great food photographers: Jonathan Lovekin (who has photographed all of Nigel Slater’s columns and cookbooks for the last 28 years), Patricia Niven and Kenneth Lam. They will look at how photographers have defined the dominant food aesthetic across the decades, the ways desire and aspiration have been constructed through photography and look at how changing technologies have reshaped not only aesthetics but also who gets to make ‘good’ food images in a globalised social media world.
You can book a ticket for Vittles presents: From Aspic to Instagram here. If you buy a ticket you can also claim a free ticket for The Legacy of Edna Lewis on Sunday. Simply enter the promo code FSFREE when adding it to your basket.
Hope to see you there!
Today’s review by Louise Benson is about the low-key restaurant and bar called Tramps which was recently opened on the Old Street end of City Road by the artist Peter Doig and his partner Parinaz Mogadassi.
The only sign for Tramps Bar is hand-drawn in red felt-tip pen on an A4 sheet that is roughly taped to a black door with white masking tape. ‘Its Five star rating is here’, reads an addendum scrawled on a scrap of unused receipt paper taped below, followed by a doodle showing the promised five stars. ‘Sighned [sic] by a Co Customer’, it says below. Both notes appear to have been written by a child.
This is the first hint that the five-table restaurant and bar, tucked just off the Old Street end of City Road (behind the only McDonald’s drive-thru that I know of in Zone 1), is not only uninterested in pandering to Google Maps aggregators or walk-ins, but actively opposed to the type of establishment that might generate mass ‘five-star’ appeal. In this sense, it has more in common with some of Soho’s members’ bars hidden behind unmarked doors, like Trisha’s on Greek Street and Gerry’s on Dean Street, which sometimes loosen their door policies to allow non-members to enter as they choose. Tramps Bar is technically open to all, but you’d have to know where it was to find it and step through the door, which is always left slightly ajar.
Tramps was established by the Iranian art dealer and curator Parinaz Mogadassi in the former studio of her husband, the painter Peter Doig. The establishment is not to be confused with the couple’s much-publicised purchase of the derelict former pub McGlynn’s in King’s Cross for £3 million. Last autumn, the pair staged the first two exhibitions in the grimy former hotel rooms of the pub, with fantastical paintings by Iranian artist Behrang Karimi and illicit photographs of a brothel bathroom by Merry Alpern. These were hung against a shower curtain in the communal bathroom and in front of wardrobes and mirrors in the bedrooms. Tramps has operated as an itinerant gallery since 2011, with exhibitions in New York and Paris, and in London at the Micawber street address that now houses the restaurant and bar.
When I visit in May, a painting by Karimi of an incongruously large, veiny foot hangs behind the pots bubbling on two small induction hobs, which are tended to by a chef named Harry McKenzie. This newly installed chef previously spent six years at the River Café, where he was a peer and friend of Max Rocha, now of Cafe Cecilia just up the canal in Hackney. There is a throughline of confident simplicity in both men’s food and a studied nostalgia for home cooking that is enough to make you briefly forget that your own mum did not, in fact, cook anything that came close to the muted elegance of these dishes. In a chunky green salad topped with whole hazelnuts and translucent slivers of sheep’s cheese, the trick is knowing exactly where to stop.