The Abingdon Review: The Same Town as the Speckled Hen

A Kensington gastropub with a 4.5, sharing its name with the Oxfordshire town that gave Britain a beer named after a filthy car

The Abingdon on Abingdon Road holds a 4.5 from six hundred and forty-seven people and charges thirty to seventy pounds a head, and it is one of the better Kensington neighbourhood restaurants.

Its name comes from the street, which comes from the Earls of Abingdon, who owned land here – and which shares that name with a town in Oxfordshire that we have already visited in this survey without going anywhere near it.

The Abingdon connection

Six articles ago we wrote about Old Speckled Hen, and established that it is not a chicken. It is a paint-spattered MG that lived in the works at Abingdon, which the men called the owld speckled ‘un, and after which Morland brewery – also of Abingdon – named a beer in 1979 to mark MG’s fiftieth year in the town.

The MG works closed in 1980. The Morland brewery closed in 2000. The beer survives, brewed in Suffolk, and the name is a mistranscription of a car.

So Abingdon, Oxfordshire, gave Britain a beer that commemorates an industry it no longer has, under a name that was never correct – and Abingdon Road, Kensington, has a gastropub with a good wine list.

The Prat is not claiming these facts are connected. We are simply noting that both are true and that nobody has put them next to each other before.

The neighbourhood restaurant, defended

It is a category that gets very little written about it and it is the most useful thing in any postcode.

It is not a destination. It is not chasing a star. Nobody is coming from another borough. It exists to be the place you go when you cannot face cooking, when somebody has a birthday, when the in-laws are visiting, or when it is Tuesday and it is raining.

It has to be good every night, for the same forty people, forever – which is a considerably harder trick than being brilliant once for a critic.

The Abingdon has been doing it for decades. Its 4.5 is built almost entirely on locals, and the reviews say so, and they name the staff, which we have now established across two hundred and fifty-six articles is the single most reliable indicator of a good venue and correlates with nothing else.

The room

A converted pub, which shows in the bones. Booths at the back – the good seats, fought over – and a bar at the front where you may drink without eating, which a great many restaurants of this kind have quietly abolished and should not have.

Verdict

Excellent food, proper wine, real neighbourhood room.

The booth, and why it matters

Every restaurant has a best table and everybody who works there knows exactly which one it is.

At the Abingdon it is the booths – high-backed, semi-private, and the only seats in the room where a table of four can talk without the next table hearing every word.

You cannot request them, exactly. You can ask, and you will be told they will see what they can do, and what happens next depends entirely on whether the person on the phone recognises your name.

This is the actual currency of the neighbourhood restaurant and it is not money. It is having been before.

Verdict

Excellent food, proper wine, real neighbourhood room.

Go. Sit in a booth. And order a pint of something that is not named after a car.

Alan Nafzger

Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]