Where should we begin? At Rules, of course. Jay Rayner’s first FT restaurant review

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

London’s oldest restaurant has a particular smell. No one would call it a scent or a perfume. It’s too elemental for that. It is meat and gravy and furniture polish and the hard-earned, glossy patina of time, a commodity it has in abundance. Rules, which opened in 1798, has history like ponds in spring have frog spawn, and I have my own history here. I first visited almost 50 years ago with my late mother, who worked for a magazine across the road. We sat side by side on a red velvet banquette, and I ate oysters for the first time. I sipped her Sancerre, ordered jugged hare and concluded that the adult world deserved my attention. I have returned many times since.

While I have written about Rules in the past, I have not reviewed it. As this newspaper’s new restaurant critic, it feels like the right place to start. There will be plenty of time to consider brave new openings, but for now it’s useful to examine somewhere that has endured to work out why. It is never just about the food, although that matters. It is about what the French chef Fernand Point of La Pyramide referred to as all the little things done well. Order champagne and the glass will be chilled. The tablecloths will be ironed. The seats will be comfortable. The lighting will be at that sweet spot where you can read the menu without worrying that it’s betraying every well-earned wrinkle. That menu will be a list of dishes you could happily choose from repeatedly. My starter of potted shrimps is not a puck of cold, solidified butter, to be chiselled from its sticking place. It has been warmed through just enough so it’s spreadable on the equally warm toast. The ballast of mace and nutmeg is measured.

Obviously, Rules can be dismissed as a ludicrous theme park. It has brass rails and mahogany, and the sort of red swirly carpet that anywhere else might be a warning klaxon of a dying institution. But it’s London’s ludicrous theme park, the careful, unselfconscious nurturing of a dozen clichés until they bloom and fill the space.

Amid the mounted antlers and 19th-century cartoons on the wall just inside the front door, there is a picture of Churchill and, on the sloping underside of the stairwell, above where we are seated, a caricature of a breast-plated Thatcher. Artist John Springs was commissioned to do the piece in 1997 by John Mayhew, only the third owner after Thomas Rule and the Bell family, although Mayhew, who sold the restaurant to his general manager Ricky McMenemy in 2022, told me once that she was not his idol. He just felt the portrait suited the space.

Rules bellows British, but in truth it has more in common with the great brasseries of Paris, places such as Bofinger and La Coupole, than it does with tatty pubs banging on about homegrown classics. The white-aproned waiters here are mostly sturdy men, capable of great delicacy. Watching them change a table’s cloth during service, with only the barest flash of the industrial furniture beneath, is like witnessing a nurse change a patient’s sheets. The brilliance of the place is that it has never been a prisoner of its history. It moves on, subtly and carefully. While the private rooms named after regular diners John Betjeman and Graham Greene remain, those for Dickens and Edward VII have made way for the palm-planted “winter garden” extension to the cocktail bar.

The wine list is crowded with big-shouldered clarets, but there are bottles now from California and Chile. The menu is held down, of course, by classic British dishes prepared according to classic British culinary traditions. Tonight’s salad of sweet Dorset crab comes with an ocean-rich brown crab mayonnaise. The steak and kidney in the pudding is braised in water rather than stock. But a lot of this British food requires armfuls of French technique. A perfectly cooked tranche of halibut, the virginal white of an Alpine snowfield, comes with a sultry blood-orange hollandaise. Featherblade of beef, first braised then crisped, rests in a pond not of gravy but of the lightest, lip-smacking jus. There is a quail escabeche on tonight’s menu, and a cassoulet of rabbit.

Rules is not perfect. Few places are. Tonight’s service is a little distracted, but they get there in the end. I have worried too about the bread sauce that accompanies the roast game birds, served in season. A spoon could never stand up in it, as it should. It’s just too thin. But there are also game chips, a fancy name for lattice crisps, hot from the deep-fat fryer. Anyone who does not love those has no business being in a restaurant. We finish tonight with a dark chocolate torte with a layer of curd, again blood orange, and a glowing dome of steamed sponge pudding with citrusy golden syrup, a scoop of chilled clotted cream and a jug of warm custard. It manages to be both adult and childish. All the best desserts are.

We think of ghosts as an unfriendly presence but here in this room, for this godless soul, they are a comfort. I feel the ghost of my mother, a woman who thought imparting a taste for oysters and Sancerre was as important as teaching a child to tie their own shoelaces and say please and thank you.

But I also sense the ghost of the 10-year-old boy I once was, glimpsing the possibilities of life’s great adventure to come. Now, with this column, I’m at the start of a new adventure. I hope you will join me for the ride. Next week: somewhere rather younger.