AGORA, Borough Market: 'A Greek salad with no olives is criminal'
Its higher-end sibling OMA may be getting a lot of praise, but can AGORA compete?
AA Gill, Sunday Times restaurant critic from 1993 to 2016, was one of the greatest food writers to ever grace the planet. I find endless entertainment and inspiration in his work, though I’m less sure I would have liked him as a person. His take on Greek food is one of his more inflammatory opinions; in which he managed to decimate the cuisine of an entire country in just a few sentences:
“Greek food is unremittingly ghastly. The Greeks, having invented tragedy, went on to serve it in paper bags to students”
“I know why Greek men (and women) have long, straggly moustaches: it’s to strain the lumps out of their wine. ‘Don’t drink the water’, we were told. Drink it? You wouldn’t wash your socks in it”.
And people call me savage.
Adrian (I like to think we’d be on first name terms) would be mortified to hear that Greek food appears to be having a bit of a moment in the UK. The latest symptom of this is the appearance of OMA and younger sibling AGORA in London’s Borough Market, which has come from the creators of Smokestak and Manteca and leapt straight into the critics’ hearts. Grace Dent, Jimi Famurewa and Giles Coren all had their socks blown off by OMA and have subsequently each written 800 words for their respective titles practically begging readers to pay a visit.
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The downstairs, cheaper, quicker, un-bookable but arguably more atmospheric offshoot AGORA has received less attention. I’ll tell you why.
When a critic goes to a restaurant, they either want it to be exceptionally good or exceptionally bad. Trying to write about food that is middling leaves us with eyes glazed over, looking into the distance and silently praying that inspiration will strike in the form of a novel way to say ‘nice’ or ‘quite good’. It’s painful. It takes longer. It doesn’t flow. There are far more words in the English language to describe something atrocious than there are to describe something that left you with absolutely no opinion either way. AA Gill knew this well.
Unlike the dishes served at its counterpart upstairs, the food at AGORA hovers at slightly above average with notes of excellence. But nevertheless, I am still going to suggest that if you’re lucky enough to be wandering round Borough Market, you should go. Why? Well the flatbread (£3.5), oxymoronically puffed and finger-pinching hot from the oven, with sides of crisp-topped hummus (£5) and a peppy ezme salata (£5) was a most auspicious start. Skewers of juicy chicken thigh (£6 each) and pork souvlaki (£5 each) steeped in olive oil, meat juices and a spritz of lemon juice boasted of the fire over which they were so expertly cooked.
If the Greek salàta (£9) had contained any olives, I would have declared it one of the best I’ve had. But a Greek salad with no olives is criminal, even if they had sent an apology in the form of earthy carob rusk croutons.
As is often the way, things went downhill as the meal progressed; the second flatbread, this time topped with spicy pork sausage (it was chorizo and I don’t appreciate the attempts to disguise it) and pineapple (£9) broke the spell entirely. We were reminded more of cheese on toast than a mini break in the Mediterranean, and a bad one at that.
What should have been the pièce de résistance, spit-roasted Cornish lamb (£15), fell the flattest. Literally. In Greece, lamb is generous melt-in the mouth hunks of meat, cooked for hours wrapped in paper with potatoes or feta - the end result so often has you searching the skies for whichever God surely delivered this masterpiece. AGORA’s lamb is less Olympics and more school sports day. Not nearly enough fat content, sliced so thin it barely registers its punch on the tongue and redeemed more by the accompanying mint sauce than anything else.
The final tragedy is a complete absence of dessert. Not even a token baklava. Despite some successes, at this point I could see AA Gill smirking in the back of my mind. ‘I told you so’. Yes, but AGORA is only two weeks old and its promise is stratospheric. Many would disagree with me, but I think if a restaurant has a good enough atmosphere then I can forgive mediocre food, and AGORA has serious ‘rizz’ as the young people would say.
The irony of it sharing a name with the complete atmospheric vacuum of a bar on Park Street, Bristol, is not lost on me.
On a recent Thursday evening, AGORA was packed, spilling wannabe diners out onto the street where they formed a hungry but fast-moving queue. I think it has sticking power and that the queue is worth joining. I can easily see myself sitting at that counter, dipping that flatbread in that ezme salata in 20 years time and being very happy about it.
AA Gill may have been right once upon a time, but if anything the real tragedy is that he never got the chance to share his thoughts on AGORA, which would have been a most entertaining read and far wittier and more astute than I could ever manage. Oh, and the fact that he never got to meet me.
Words and photos by Meg Houghton-Gilmour
AGORA, 4 Bedale Street, London, SE1 9AL