Fay Maschler visits Café Clement, the all-day brasserie at f the St Clement Hotel
‘Do you have a reservation?’ This is almost invariably the greeting when arriving at a restaurant, sometimes uttered by a receptionist with his or her back to a more or less empty room. It is so profoundly inhospitable and lowering, even if you have made a reservation. As I approach the front doors of the St Clement Hotel, the latest project of Nick Jones of Soho House fame, there is a porter with a smile as big as all outdoors – and bear in mind we are more or less on the Embankment – who instead ushers me in with the question: ‘Will you be eating with us today?’ Absolutely.
It is my first visit to the hotel’s all-day brasserie, Café Clement, which has opened quite stealthily. Soft opening, I believe it is called, and the pea-green carpet on the short flight of curved steps leading up to the restaurant with its wraparound terrace reinforces the phrase. My lunch companion is Jake Missing, editorial lead at the restaurant recommendation site Infatuation London. He has been evaluating the customers – ‘the room feels both ladies that lunch and boys who do business’ (there is the odd celeb) – and has overheard at the next-door table a man discussing a colleague’s ‘stack’ that he suspects has been hidden somewhere. This chap’s dining partner orders steak tartare to start followed by steak medium rare.
We respond to warm sunny weather by starting with Clement Summer, a jaunty salad of peas, asparagus, borlotti beans and Tuscan pecorino, and also pay homage to Rowley Leigh (for whom Café Clement’s executive chef Danny Bohan once worked at Kensington Place before his long stint at The River Cafe) by ordering Rowley’s Scallops with pea purée and mint vinaigrette. Jake’s take on his main course of salt-baked trout is ‘tender, luminous and dependably pleasant’.
My next visit is four days later for dinner with my sister Beth and daughter Alice. My son Ben once worked for Nick Jones at Soho House and is consequently a highly skilled party-giver, having learnt invaluable lessons in Los Angeles and Cannes. I am very taken with the St Clement Hotel, which, as Alice immediately observes, is cool in both senses of the word. The name references the nearby church, St Clement Danes, and of course invokes the nursery rhyme ‘Oranges and Lemons’. Citrus-inspired scent is discernible in the lobby.
Before dinner, we have a drink in Bobbi’s Bar on the ground floor behind a blank door that could be the entrance to a housekeeper’s cupboard. But the reveal is a piano, a guitar and a barman with knowing wrists. Apparently dancing into the early hours can erupt after dinner. Highlights of the café meal include sprightly zucchini fritters; reliable oeuf mayonnaise; heavy white linen tablecloths; marinated Sorrento tomatoes dressed with anchovies, olives, capers and basil; a beautifully tiled floor inspired by the tides of the Thames; roasted Merrifield duck with dripping potatoes; lively and efficient staff who never enquire if you are enjoying your meal; Tyler Chardonnay 2023 from Santa Barbara; a perfect summer dessert of grilled white peach and apricot served with cold cream.
Soho House members’ clubs, from which Nick Jones stepped down in 2022, always seem to me to put fun before a focus on food (arguably little wrong with that), but at St Clement with the participation of Danny Bohan (and, by the time you read this, Florence Knight, late of Sessions Arts Club, cooking at Lunette restaurant on the rooftop), the potential for treats has expanded. And I like this definition of clemency: ‘an act of leniency or the disposition to be merciful’.
