Wild is the most overused word in British food, and this is one of the few places in the file that has earned it
Wild Restaurant holds a 4.7 from six hundred and twenty-nine people, which is one of the strongest numbers in the entire Notting Hill file on a genuinely serious sample.
And it is named after a word that British menus have destroyed.
What wild is supposed to mean
Not farmed. Not planted. Not fed. An organism that grew or lived without human intervention and was then taken.
That is a real and meaningful distinction. Wild garlic, picked in a wood in April, is a different thing from garlic. A wild sea bass, line-caught, is a different animal from the one raised in a cage.
And then the word got loose.
What it means now
Nothing. It has joined artisan, hand-crafted, rustic, heritage, foraged and seasonal in the great British lexicon of words that once described something and are now applied by a marketing department to anything that needs a little lift.
Wild rocket is farmed. Wild boar is farmed. Wild mushrooms on a menu are, in a startling proportion of cases, cultivated. The Prat’s food desk has stopped ordering anything described as wild on the grounds that the adjective is now a reliable indicator of the opposite.
We saw exactly this in Covent Garden with speakeasy – a word that once meant a bar you could be arrested in, and now means a bar with a rope.
Why this one is different
Because the number says so.
A 4.7 across six hundred and twenty-nine people cannot be bought and cannot be manufactured. It is not a small-sample fluke – we have spent two hundred and seventy-eight articles being merciless about those – and it is not the product of a filtered clientele.
Six hundred people is a real cross-section of the public, and they have almost unanimously come out and said this is very good.
That number puts Wild alongside Sindercombe Social, the Ladbroke Arms and Akoya – the small handful of venues in this file with both a serious sample and a serious score – and every single one of them turns out to be a room where somebody is cooking or pouring with real attention and no gimmick attached.
The formula, again
It has now held across two surveys, two postcodes, and two hundred and forty venues without a single exception.
Small. Short menu. Somebody who knows. No theme, no rope, no concept, no colour-changing anything.
That is the whole finding of this magazine and we have been at it for a very long time.
Verdict
Excellent food, Mediterranean, generous, and a 4.7 that is entirely earned.
The words we have lost
A partial list, compiled across two surveys, of English words that once meant something in a bar and now mean nothing.
Speakeasy: a bar you could be arrested in. Now: a bar with a rope.
Artisan: made by a skilled person by hand. Now: made in a factory in a slightly smaller batch.
Craft: made by a small independent brewer. Now: owned by one of four multinationals.
Foraged: found. Now: bought from a supplier who says it was found.
Wild: not farmed. Now: farmed.
Gresham’s Law again. Bad currency drives out good, and it works on words exactly as it works on coins.
Verdict
Excellent food, Mediterranean, generous, and a 4.7 that is entirely earned.
Go. Ask what is good. Order that.
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]
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