The Draft House - Open for Business. Some thanks...

So, after a collossal amount of thought, stress, dust, money, great ideas, dreadful ideas (all of which might better be summarised as Sturm und Drang or in reality just so much  Smoke and Light), The Draft House Northcote Road is open.

I hope the end result matches our ambition at the beginning. I think it does. That ambition was to make a place that did for draft beer (our national drink after all - in spite of the horrors visited upon it) what our culture has done for food and wine over the past twenty years. Namely to take the quality, provenance and serving of it seriously - and to celebrate choice. With 17 beers on tap and more than fifty in bottle I think we have certainly achieved the latter. No less important we wanted to provide good, honest food and warm service with heart. This last is the hardest to achieve but I think we will get there, no doubt with a few stumbles along the way. We hope you will come and take a look, try a pint of thirds and an ox-tongue fritter and (PLEASE) let us know what you think.

As we won't be having an opening party until January I wanted to get some thank-yous in.

We have a lot of people to thank, none more than those who haven't shown up yet - our beloved customers, or guests as we must now call you. Well, actually, you have shown up - in spite of the lack of signage, in spite of the pile of builder's rubble outside (yes, only the inside is finished - we hope that by tonight the rest will be more or less done) and we love you for it.

But I must also thank:

• Our stalwart architect, Richard Blandy - an island of calm in an uncertain, floating world
• Wayne Barrell - our builder. Yes, we still are on speaking terms (but then, I haven't had the final bill yet). Wayne has been very tolerant and cheerful of a project wherein the specification has been pretty much made up as we went along.
• the stupendously cool and stylish Frith Kerr of Studio Frith for her relentlessness in preventing me from being naff 
• Justin Anderson for the work of art which will adorn the currently blank sign on the exterior. And for being my early sounding board ref the Draft House - he was surprisingly tolerant for a teetotaller. Noone I have met is more creative.
• our chef, Simon Noumar for riding to the rescue after Chef #1 walked out after a week (legals prevent me from fully expressing myself on that subject). Simon, what a top man you are.
• Matt Jacomb, for introducing me to Simon.
• Greig Middleton, for stewarding us so calmly and gracefully through the brand development process.
• To the blaggers and bloggers who agreed to be Guinea Pigs - you know who you are
• To Mathilde for letting me use her photos from this week. 
• Leigh Milner, for giving up all conjugal rights over her fiance Adam Simmons during this process
• Le Cafe Anglais for tolerating my complete lack of focus over the past two weeks (actually, I imagine you were thrilled)
• The whole team at The Westbridge (see Le Cafe Anglais) but also for tolerating being a dumping ground for endless Draft House detritus
• To the new team at Northcote Road - good luck!
• Theo Fordham of Twenty Retail for finding the site (and looking at 100 others we didn't take)
• Alex Mole (now GM at Westbridge). Again, ports in storms and all that.
• Juan (pronounced Jewan) Christian - our Manx man who we knew was a star from the first moment he walked in the door at Westbridge three years ago and who will now be running The Draft House 
• Charlie Moul for fixing everything (and for his gasp of pleasure when he first sipped a Draft House Light Lager yesterday)
• To Sof (the lovely Mrs McVeigh) for tolerating an almost terminal state of distraction and general work-related solipsism (thanks babe)
• Adam Simmons (the main man at Westbridge and Draft House) for quite simply keeping the whole goddamn show on the road. Only yesterday did he finally lose it, and sent himself home for a rest. An hour later he was back smiling. Adam, your determination to get the job done and the general leadership shown has been extraordinary. Thanks, pal.

There is of course a lot more to say but I'll save that for a future post. Onwards and upwards...

The Draft House Northcote Road

94 Northcote Road

London SW11 6QW

020 7924 1814

northcote@drafthouse.co.uk

So, what did my sister's show look like?

This is how it looked. Without the celebrities. The demi-monde. The critics. I am told she almost sold it out the night before anyway. I wonder if she can lend me a dime?

Two Thrilling Wine Dinners at Le Cafe Anglais Up-Coming

We are very pleased to announce – at rather short notice, I know – the return of Paolo de Marchi to Le Cafe Anglais. Maker of sublime Chianti (Gordon Brown won’t be coming then), the legendary Cepparello and now forging ahead with wines from his family estate in Piedmont, Paolo is an old friend whose wines are very dear to our hearts. After last year’s brilliant dinner, it would have been criminal not to get him back. Expect an evening of wonderful wine, some gutsy autumnal food and an opportunity to meet one of the wine world’s most modest but engaging personalities. Priced at £70.00 (plus service), this is a date not to be missed. Please check your diaries for Tuesday October 13^th and book without delay.

DINNER I

DINNER II

Our next dinner promises to be a rare treat. Giles MacDonogh is a man of many talents. A great expert on German and Austrian food and wine, he has written extensively on the subject (especially in that great paper of record, The Financial Times) and was chairman of the German and Austrian panels of this year’s Decanter Wine Awards Giles may be better known as a historian, specialising in twentieth century German history. His most recent book, 1938: Hitler’s Gamble was extremely well reviewed on its publication in June. Giles has a third string to his bow, being a painter of striking architectural images(go to www.macdonogh.co.uk  to learn more). Ostensibly an evening of Austrian food and wine (think Tafelsptitz, Kracher and Brundlmayer), this should be a highly stimulating and enjoyable dinner on Monday October 19^th. Priced at £70.00 plus service.

To book call 020 7221 1415 or e-mail us at info@lecafeanglais.co.uk. 

Noted Critic JJ Charlesworth on my Sister's Work

Ahead of Whitney's new show, which opens 9th October at the A Foundation, here is an essay by JJ Charlesworth. It is extraordinary to see reference points such as Jackson Pollock, Max Ernst and Yves Klein. For more information go here.

Whitney McVeigh: Between Bodies and Images

Looking at Whitney McVeigh’s new work, the big monochromes and the fragile collages and monoprints on aging paper, provokes some surprising questions about what makes art contemporary, and how contemporary art deals with its own history. Because McVeigh ploughs a very different furrow from a great many artists working today. She doesn’t work with video, and she doesn’t make ‘conceptual’ art or installation art or performance. She doesn’t make ironic work about how weird it is to be an artist, or art that is to do with pop culture or fashion or politics. Her work is not high-tech, or obsessed with mimicking the high finish of design objects or luxury goods. She works with paint and ink and paper and brushes – traditional, basic materials and techniques – and her constant theme has a classical dimension to it, as if returning to first principles – making a mark in which the human figure often appears to emerge, from little more than the visible shift from black to white.

This isn’t what you tend to expect from artists working today, and McVeigh’s work seems to ask of us that we should stop to consider what it is we have grown used to in contemporary art, and how her work differs from this. Mostly, what it asks is for us to wonder whether some important ideas, that once focused the energies and arguments of artists, have been forgotten or put aside in much of the art of the moment. But given that McVeigh’s works are not a simple return to past attitudes and ideas, but cut across different ways of thinking about and making art, what might these questions be?

McVeigh’s monoprint works combine an openness to the spontaneity of fluid materials with an acute sense of attention to what they might yield, producing surfaces on which physical matter becomes image. She might say that she is not making images so much as trying to discover them, and when she talks about working with the materials she uses, she suggests that they might have a ‘life of their own’. Unlike a more conventional painter, whose mark-making is defined by the intermediary of brushes she uses, McVeigh works with a more unstable and unpredictable set of procedures, in which paint is poured onto or applied to paper, and in which a process of folding over of the paper, and the transferring of the paint between sheets, allows it to be configured in multiple layers. While McVeigh’s way of working is highly tactile, it is also distanced by the layers of paper she uses to impress the paint – she’s often pressing through the paper to the paint, rather than applying paint onto the paper with a brush. It’s a way of working that stops us from being too preoccupied with the ‘touch’ of the artist - of the sense that what one is looking at is a form of ‘writing’, in which the movement of the brush is the equivalent of the gesture of the artist’s hand; and, by implication, a sort of extension and expression of their emotional state or their personality.

Most famously, it was Jackson Pollock who did away with the touch of the brush in painting, allowing drips and pours into painting’s range of technical possibilities. Other artists come to mind: the Surrealist Max Ernst developed ways of pressing oil paint under glass to produce unpredictable, organic patterns and forms; and Yves Klein notoriously used the direct impression of naked human models onto canvas in his series of Anthropometries. Such a range of examples points to an important development in western art in the latter half of the last century – the shift of interest from painting as a carrier of images or representations, towards the painted mark as a material presence in its own right, or as the direct index of another physical presence or object.

What these earlier examples share is a fascination for how a material such as paint might be released from the codes, habits and traditions that tend to dictate how it has been used by artists in the past. They explore the potential of chance and accident in the making of a painted surface, and they partially relinquish the painter’s authority over his or her materials. In so doing, they tend to foreground the matter of the medium – the physical substance of the paint itself – emphasising its own identity and particular qualities. With artists like Klein, painting was rolled back to its most basic conditions - that of the recorded imprint of a physical body onto a surface, in which the paint acts as both image of, and one-to-one impression of, the original subject.

All of these examples reflect some aspects of what goes on in McVeigh’s monochromes, even though they are only partial affinities and handy approximations. Nevertheless, thinking about artists like Pollock and Klein allows us to think about the nature of a body and its relationship to a painting, and to us. Jackson Pollock’s body might not be ‘represented’ in his drip paintings, but they are full of the implied movement of his body. At the opposite extreme, when Klein pressed living bodies against canvas, these were not paintings of bodies, but paintings made by bodies. In the former, the need for an image has been replaced by an interest in the paint’s material presence. In the latter the image is the direct record of the object, not translated via the eye and the hand of the artists.

McVeigh’s work, by contrast, is still interested in the possibility of the painted image. Her monochromes are full of bodies; bodies made of heads, necks, torsos. They’re not ‘studies’, however. McVeigh hasn’t looked at someone and made an image of them. Instead, the bodies in her paintings ‘emerge’ in and among the formations of paint that are shaped and organised.

But perhaps the bodies in McVeigh’s works should really be called ‘figures’. What, then, is the difference between an image of a body and an image of a ‘figure’? If nothing else, this has something to do with what we understand a human being to be, as distinct from a human body. With McVeigh’s work, I’m preoccupied with the distinction between a body and somebody; between the mass of flesh and bones that makes up each of us, and the presence of thinking, living, communicating beings that are this thing we call human, which can’t simply be reduced to just a heap of dumb matter. In her monochrome works, it’s as if this distinction is the only thing that matters in the world.

Out of the formless matter of the paint emerge forms which remind us of human beings, forms which suggest the gestures of bodies that are alive with feeling and consciousness. They’re not painted as if they were at a distance – seen within the space of some visual surrounding, an image of a subject in a setting. Instead, they seem up close, almost as imprints of bodies, but still just far enough away to appear as images. This slight shift, between the bare, physical presence of the paint and the intuition of a human figure, could be seen as analogous to that slight shift that exists between the human body and the human being. McVeigh’s studio is full of portrait photographs culled from magazines. they are always of people whose faces are full of shape and incident, which are undeniably solid, flesh and bone, and yet looking at the camera with the intensity of attention one accords another human being. The question at stake in McVeigh’s images is presence; the possibility that we might recognise a presence that corresponds to our own in the matter that is in front of us.

This is undeniably a way of thinking about images of people that finds its roots in the modern art of the last century – it is this period that most vividly produced images of human beings caught between the materiality of existence and the experience of being. In more recent decades, the philosophical tendency has been to reject such metaphysics, and reduce human beings to mere matter, biological machines that have neither soul (if you are what used to be called ‘religious’) nor free will (if you are what used to be called a ‘Humanist’). But maybe what it means to be human might still add up to more than the sum of its material parts, in the way that McVeigh’s minimal, reduced forms of paint still add up to more than just paint smeared on paper. In McVeigh’s small drawings, made on the pages of second hand technical books, there is little more than a kind of black smudge – a vertical body or a whorl of knotted black energy - which nevertheless manages to say something like ‘I am here’, beyond the mechanical and lifeless information that is printed on the page beneath. One particular drawing stands out, when thinking of McVeigh’s attitude towards presence. On one side is a reproduction of a Portrait of a Young Woman, by the sixteenth-century German painter Jorg Breu. But over her face has been traced another face, of an old crone. It makes little sense, until one discovers that the origin of the tracing is to be found on the reverse of the page, in another reproduction, of a portrait of an old woman. The face of one woman is traced into the face of the other, as ‘lines in her face’. What was an image of the human body has become physical, once again, inscribed not as a reproduction or re-presentation, but as a physical inscription of a body, inscribed into another body. More than an image of a thing, it is the mark of human presence, and of the artist who makes it.

© JJ Charlesworth 2009

Chateau Batailley Dinner at Le Cafe Anglais

Dinner with Chateau Batailley

Monday 14^th September

Aperitif

Saint-Péray Brut NV Thiers

Tasting

Chateau Batailley 2001, 2004, 2006

Ceps on Brioche

Chateau Batailley 1996, 1990

Roast Sirloin of Beef with Bone Marrow, Shallots and Red Wine

Chateau Batailley 1986, 1982

Kirkham’s Lancashire, Montgomery Cheddar and Reblochon

Chateau Batailley 1975, 1966

Tarte Tatin

Chateau du Levant 2005

Nick Cave For Dummies (but Dummies with taste)

If, like me, you increasingly find modern novels an effort but you have a mostly non-gay crush on Nick Cave then please check out my dear friend Peter Collingridge's multi-media audiobook of The Death of Bunny Munro.

It can be downloaded from the I-Tunes Store for your IPhone and features Nick Cave reading the book, a specially written soundtrack, video of Nick Cave reading the book and, as they say, much much more. Preview here.


I suspect we are glimpsing the future of publishing, light-years ahead of the ghastly Kindle.

[My other friend Sarah Churchwell was preparing herself to slate the book on Newsnight Late Review when I saw her last week (apparently it made her feel physically sick, the first ever book to do so). What greater recommendation could there be?]

Bar Snacks Pas Deux: This Time It's Facebook

I am, frankly, a Facebook whore. I log on every few days and if it's late and - ho hum - I have been 'out', I tend to push the Friend Suggestions button repeatedly until I fall asleep. This, people, is how I have reached 1,212 Friends. That said, it adds a Twitter-like frisson to the Facebook experience not knowing at least half of the people who read one's ramblings. It also leads to embarrassing moments in restaurants when some lovely, gregarious soul interrupts a dinner with your wife to announce loudly: "I AM YOUR FACEBOOK FRIEND". To say that Mrs McVeigh, who is not on Facebook, assumes a look of irritated bemusement at this juncture would be to underplay the drama of the moment.

Anyway, enough pre-amble - who gives a Tuscan Fried Bat (of which, more later) about social networking anyway.

So when I enquired politely for Bar Snacks suggestions (see post below for more deep background), I was really gratified by the response:

Nick Kearns

Calamari

Yesterday at 11:58 · Delete

Lizzie Mabbott

Scotch eggs, sausage rolls, pork scratchings (home-made are delicious)... so basically any pork product.

Yesterday at 12:26 · Delete

Ossian Shine

Yes, scratchings... Ooh, and pickled eggs...

Yesterday at 12:28 · Delete

Giovanna Cantone

bite size cod parcels with a sweet chillie dip. yummm.

lobster bits, with a butter lemon dip..to die for....

Yesterday at 12:54 · Delete

Julian Lloyd

a small pot of hot crabmeat with parmesan and breadcrumb crust. There was a pub on Galway Bay that used to do this.

Yesterday at 13:03 · Delete

Jay Rayner

Use rind on bacon in the kitchen and then serve bowls of fried off rinds.

Yesterday at 13:04 · Delete

Giovanna Cantone

parmesan and crab meat! I would never put parmesan with any fish...yuk

Yesterday at 13:05 · Delete

Annabel Haldane Nash

sticky cocktail sausages with wholegrain mustard

Yesterday at 13:06 · Delete

Silvy Weatherall

Deep fried crispy pigs ears

Yesterday at 13:08 · Delete

Giovanna Cantone

deep fried pancheta served on a stick with parmesan and cherry tomatoes, warm chillie olive oil dip.

Yesterday at 13:13 · Delete

Giovanna Cantone

or serve with sweet onion.

Yesterday at 13:20 · Delete

Annabel Haldane Nash

Larks' tongues. Wrens' livers....& some Tuscany fried bats.

Yesterday at 13:38 · Delete

Matthew Doull

Pigs in a blanket, sliders, short ribs, onion rings

Yesterday at 14:01 · Delete

Laura Campbell

Grilled halloumi; mini prawn cocktails; antipasti platters for 2/4/6; homemade tarmasalata or hummous on hot pitta; chips & dips...

Yesterday at 14:23 · Delete

Toby Duckett

mini yorkshire pud with beef and horseradish/mini toad in the holes w spicy sausage, chargrilled veg kebabs, mixed satay, bbq lamb cutlet, rabbitburger in bun, crispy fries, summer fruit eggedosis.

Yesterday at 18:19 · Delete

Christina Macmillan

Chanterelles on toasted bread or something with black truffles

7 hours ago · Delete

So: thanks Friends, Acquaintances and particularly those whose private world I have invaded uninvited. And you're all cordially invited to a tasting at The Draft House when we eventually get the place open in October.

Watch this Space.