I’ve never eaten dinner at The Baring. Thinking about it, I’ve actually never even ordered off the main menu, with the exception of a single, simple green salad.
What I have had is a succession of lovely lunches, little luxuries that occasionally stud my working week with a little hit of something less mundane.Â
The Baring has, you see, one of London’s most tempting lunch offers: a single dish, rotating weekly, for £12, rising to £15 if you fancy a pint or a glass of wine alongside.
I say ‘tempting’ rather than ‘best value’ for a few reasons. One, because once you throw in service you’ve spent the best part of £20, which I suspect is a little beyond most people’s typical lunch hour outlay.
It’s also because the £12 dish isn’t really the draw here, is it? It’s that carefully priced £3 upsell, that little nudge that says just because it’s a Wednesday doesn’t mean you need to stick to a soft drink. A little glass won’t do any harm, will it? And it’s only £3 after all, it would be churlish to say no…
Don’t worry, there is more to my appreciation for this pub than the cheap glasses of plonk. There’s the dining room, for one: expansive, airy, light and bright despite a preponderance of heavy, sombre wooden furniture and green leather banquettes. Dinner bookings disappear fast, so presumably the place fills up, but at lunch it’s an oasis of calm. Fellow solo diners are interspersed with new parents and the occasional couple; there always seems to be a table free, but I prefer to perch at the bar, a habit learned from a lifetime of treating myself to eating alone.
I should probably talk about the food at some point. Each week’s lunch special is scrawled on a small blackboard near the door, making it all the easier to eschew the proffered menu and get straight to the point. The first time I visited lunch was gnocchi drenched in a veal ragù, the second a merguez sandwich with pickles, salsa verde, and a fresh slaw on the side.
The pub itself tends to big up its occasional steak frites weeks. The beef comes thin-sliced but pink, puddled in peppercorn sauce alongside a perfect pile of slender fries, crisp enough to shatter. It feels a perfect treat, a small enough extravagance to squeeze into a lunch hour and still get back in time for that 2pm meeting, only a little merrier for it.
The quality of the cooking is routinely impressive, and for the price almost impossible to fault. Order off the menu and main courses will run you near £30, so a light bite for less than half that is an obvious draw.Â
And it is a light bite, for better or worse. I’ll admit that on a couple of occasions I’ve left The Baring still peckish, wondering if they couldn’t bulk things up with a little bread, or beans, or anything else that’s cheap and filling and might send me back to my desk a little closer to that full and drowsy state that afternoons were made for.Â
Still, for that and other problems, there’s always Quince. For when The Baring leaves me with a little hint of longing left over, the slightest detour on my walk home takes me to that bustling counter of pies, pastries, and the occasional quivering slab of custard tart. By this point my little luxury of a lunch seems to have expanded slightly, but perhaps that’s simply what I get for falling for that £3 wine ruse every time.