St John

Three decades on, St John appears to have changed not one jot. Still the same whitewashed walls, the same squat wine glasses, the same commitment to ‘nose-to-tail’ cookery. When we visited, there was a dish on the daily menu from the restaurant's second cookbook (published 2007): called simply ‘kohlrabi’, it is simply kohlrabi – albeit mandolined and lavished with olive oil, lemon, capers and chervil. An excellent use of a maligned vegetable, but the £11 price tag speaks of 2025. There's no doubt that eating at St John can sometimes test your faith. Our beef broth was straightforward enough, but the vegetables looked like they had been chopped by someone’s granny in a rush to get tea on the table (but, oh boy, can granny cook). Likewise, a serving of sea bass was no looker: battle-scarred from a hot pan, it came with slow-cooked fennel in a state of near-collapse and a Pernod-splashed liquor into which some anchovies had long since disappeared. A food stylist would shudder but, again, such flavour! While some dishes such as the signature bone marrow and parsley salad still resemble exhibits in an edgy east London gallery, others look like they’ve emerged from the kitchen of an old Parisian bistro, where the chef no longer gives a fig about wooing Le Figaro . If they have a pair of tweezers in the cupboard, they’ll be for plucking bristles from pig's trotters, not garnishing quail's eggs with micro herbs. However, a serving of wild boar terrine (with cornichons and excellent sourdough) and a plate of mallard (with parsnips and pickled walnut) both successfully combine sharp looks and keen flavour. ‘Are paper tablecloths and one wine glass for all wines and water taking lack of pretension too far?’ asks one fan. We might say the same about a dessert plate that arrives with a chip in it the size of your thumbnail. That said, puddings are terrific and there are no fewer than 10 to choose from: our lemon pie had sticky, jammy citrus sandwiched between crisp, sugared pie crust, while chocolate mousse was made from first-rate confectionery. The wine list is the type you'd find in a Parisian bistro, with a tip-top house pour, St John Rouge, ushering in a glorious selection from the French regions.

In today’s fickle restaurant world, where fads come and go, few can lay claim to being truly iconic – but Fergus Henderson and Trevor Gulliver’s St John is one that can. For almost three decades Henderson’s nose-to-tail approach to cooking has helped raise the profile of British food across the world, as well as teach a legion of chefs about how to respect the whole animal and reduce food waste – themes that are even more pressing today than they were when St John opened in 1994. And he’s done it with a rather simple but focused outlook that doesn’t preach but merely leads by example. To eat at St John – to tuck into a middle white chop with trotter and prune and suck the roasted bone marrow that accompanies the parsley salad – is a rite of passage (for meat eaters at least), as it is to end with a plate of its Eccles cake and Lancashire cheese. Few restaurants in this country have a menu so inviting, where you can feel the heart and soul of the place in every dish. Like its cooking, the stark, stripped-back dining room doesn’t seem to have aged – the whitewashed bricks were a feature long before exposed brickwork was de rigueur – and the room continues to ooze a conviviality most restaurateurs would give their right arm for. In more recent times the restaurant has spawned a sibling restaurant in Marylebone, but it is its Clerkenwell mothership that has the biggest hold on the psyche of London diners. Thanks to St John, the nose-to-tail revolution is happening in dining rooms across the world, but at its spiritual home you’ll still find it done the best.