The things I could, but won’t, tell you about Crocker’s Folly. All sorts of things. The building has a history as long, dramatic and littered with ghost-sightings as you could hope for from a former gin palace, and the telling of it could be a novel in itself. Unfortunately there’s no column space to do the backstory justice right now, because the new incarnation of the Folly is more dramatic still.
The fairly modest outside gives way to a series of vast, fiercely ornate rooms. Taken over by the Maroush Group this year after a decade of languishing closed, it’s now a mass of restored stucco walls, heavy wood panelling and huge pillars. For it to exist anywhere is unexpected and amazing; to find it lurking in a quiet, residential bit of St. John’s Wood is an enchantingly weird, Narnia at the back of your wardrobe type experience.
The main entrance opens onto the 1898 Bar, itself big enough to be a good-sized restaurant. It’s staffed by friendly, high-energy people in three piece suits and cocktail dresses, which is also the exact cross-section of people that are drinking there. It’s all gilded ceilings and weighty furniture and, we’re told by the host, no less than fifty kinds and colours of marble within that one room: believe me that the woeful lack here of any Fifty Shades of Wordplay isn’t for want of time devoted to trying to think some up.
From there it’s two more connecting rooms, a few elaborately carved archways and a thousand points of chandelier light that take us through to the Lord’s Dining Room. There’s an equally minor-ballroom-of-Versailles aesthetic going on here, but they’ve managed to keep it feeling intimate; pairs are seated close together on one side of each huge, round table, and with far fewer tables overall than they could have forced into the space.
I’d expected the food to be highly-wrought and have a state dinner feel to it, in line with the intense theatricality of the restaurant. In fact it’s a menu of relatively simple, unshowy British-ish dishes, most of them what I think of as high-end comfort food: gnocchi with wild mushrooms; lamb cannon; beef cheek, and cocktails featuring Guinness and chocolate bitters, or toothpicks threaded with whole, sour cherries.
My date is half Italian by pedigree, and wholly so in his scepticism of anyone deemed to be messing with a classic. It’s proof of just how good the gnocchi are that their total deviance – slightly fried, rather than just boiled, with a light crunch of griddlemarks to the outside – only gets them praised. As for the lamb cannon, it’s tender and very pink, because apparently Crocker’s Folly is a place that really trusts you to know how rare you want it, and it might be the best lamb cannon since time began. I strongly suspect that’s the case, but it’s possible that my mind has been so comprehensively blown by the onslaught of chandeliers and fireplaces and charm that I just can’t tell.
So the food is, I think, probably excellent. When our waiter tells me I’m going to love the pistachio crème brulee – and then repeats ‘love’, and then, ‘yes, I swear it, love’, and then a few more proclamations to that effect – I believe him. But if the food were only alright, or even, probably, if it all tasted like being punched in the mouth with a fistful of mud, it wouldn’t make much difference: you’d still want to come to Crocker’s Folly, to eat in this bizarre, out-of-the-way pocket of splendour.
Crocker’s Folly, 24 Aberdeen Place, St Johns Wood, London, NW8 8JR. Tel: 020 7289 9898. Website.
