MissChief entertains her beautiful beau at St John

For a lunchtime trip to St John(known for "nose to tail eating"), we couldn't have wanted for better weather than we had; the brooding white sky and nip in the air made the buzzing bar and dining room of St John seem like the most welcome sanctuary for a pair of ravenous, cold carnivores. I arrived before my birthday-boy/lunch-buddy and felt a little uncomfortable waiting on my own as other tables assessed. Probably to work out why a)I wasn't dressed in standard issue City attire or b) why I was not dressed appropriately for tucking into entrails (...cream jacket). Still, I passed the
time pleasantly, scoffing the home-made bread and studying the lunch and wine menus to make sure I was about to make the right choices.

Birthday boy bustled in from the cold eager to tuck into a glass of wine, so we ordered a bottle of Cotes de Roussillon. I understand that the restaurant does a lot of wine sourcing around the Languedoc-Roussillon region so it made some sense, plus James (that's the one with the birthday) used to spend a lot of time near Perpignan on family holidays and it was wasn't ruinous (£18). The Roussillon wine turned out to be a very smooth and berry-ish both in appearance and taste. Our appetites didn't allow much time to swill our wine and contemplate its flavours so we trotted on to the first course, which luckily arrived promptly (as did all of our food and drinks). I kicked off the meal with the famous roast bone marrow with parsley salad, which was both mouthfillingly rich thanks to the bone marrow and mercifully refreshing thanks to the parsley salad. James nodded approval as he wolfed down his terrine with cornichons. I definitely had more fun poking the marrow out of the bones with my special tool.

In retrospect I think I would probably have liked a little longer to prepare for the enormous plate of chitterlings with radishes (chitterlings=small intestine of the pig) but again the richness was offset well by the radishes and some kind of lambs lettuce and I was surprised by how smoky and roughly textured the chitterlings were; not slippery as I had suspected. The generosity of the portion overwhelmed me in the end, but the half I ate was spot on. Meanwhile James set about savouring the most wonderfully flavoured roast Middlewhite pork, the crackling did not crackle but the caramel and deep pork flavours sang in the mouth. The mashed swede was stunning and it's an astonishing feat to turn a dense vegetable into such a light melting amber mash. I suspect we would not wish to ask how much butter was used...

Though the pudding menu looked fun and varied (Madeleines by the 1/2 dozen or apple sorbet with Polish vodka) we opted for a very fine pair of double espressos which created an illusion of digestion for a moment or two. For the two of us, the lunch bill was a fairly meaty £88 including a bottle of wine and service but worth it for a unique and ultimately entertaining winter's lunch.