Sweetings, 39 Queen Victoria St, City of London, London EC4N 4SF
A people-watching time capsule
London stinks of history. When I first visited with my Mum in the 90s, it’s the smell of the underground I remember most; the humming musk of mothballs preserved in Victorian mechanical grease, carried by the swelling warmth of trapped body heat.
Standing on the escalator, unaware of the Right Hand Side Rule, I remember holding Mum’s hand, hers equally as clammy. Both of us out of our depth, as a conveyor belt of limbs streamed past.
The whole place was like a factory — its steel dulled with the intake of London’s famous air quality, bustling with people appearing to both feed and be produced by it. It was the demonic furnace in Home Alone on an industrial scale.
With the motto ‘Unchanged since 1889’, Sweetings prides itself on being a time capsule. Although officially a restaurant, it’s “…more of a pub” according to David Ellis, who’s been keen on introducing me, fully appreciating how nerdy I get about history. London might be rife with naff ghost tours, but give me one where you can eat and drink, any day.
Wood panelling, navy blue upholstered stools and a sprawling mosaic floor, Sweetings looks to seat you in any way they can, sometimes placing the odd table next to the bar itself. Bookings do not exist — after all, it’s smack-bang in a vortex of Fleet Street footfall, so why bother?
Waiting for David in a deluge of navy blue gilets and Merino half-zip neck jumpers, I stand like a radioactive intern on the floor of a Stock Exchange. It’s as if everyone knows I’m new, and I find myself dodging incoming limbs once again, collapsing my own in a bid to reduce my target silhouette.
In old school garb, the staff outdress punters by an order of magnitude, whirling around with precision and purpose. Each commanding their space in a way that says they will bend, but not be bent to serve you.
Two men have been sitting with their plate of the day’s special of langoustine linguine for so long, it’s visibly clagging as one of them winds it onto their fork the way a child might use a screwdriver for the first time. For some, it seems that the food operates as more of a loophole.
Fish and seafood is the specialty. Fat, thumb-sized pieces of scallop are wrapped in thick, albeit cheap, smoked bacon; the surf & turf’s answer to Pigs in Blankets. Just-cooked in a way that brings chewing to a halt a beginning scanning with your tongue for rawness, they’re the sort of thing you want piled high a bar snack, even with the forlorn 12-gauge scattering of dried parsley.
Ordering the skate wing, you’re asked how you want it cooked — poached, grilled or pan-fried — opting for the latter. A deeply bronzed, rippling door wedge of a skate wing arrives, with a little jug of black butter, lurking with bulbous capers and a fine dice of shallots. It pours like the oil that keeps the underground lubed, before pooling into depths of chestnut brown and shallows of gold.
Plump streamers of flesh leave the bones as if they’ve only ever just rested on them, and then it hits you: For a place this popular that trades on history and location alone, the food could afford to be markedly worse. It’s like a souvenir shop that makes things from scratch when it could just phone it all in.
David orders the fish pie out of seasoned reflex. Chunks of cod and scallops are subtly backlit with the pale glow of smoked haddock, the blush of salmon and chubby prawns, all jostling for position under a 20-tog duvet of thoroughly buttered mashed. Alongside, a surgeon’s dish spills over with blanched samphire and a damp scrim of spinach, both blanched to maximum verdancy.
A mix of Guinness and Champagne, Sweetings is famous for serving Black Velvets — a drink originally created by Brooks's Club in London in 1861 to mourn the death of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's Prince Consort. Get it in a pint because that’s when they dish out the frosty pewter tankards instead at ambient temperature. It tastes like someone overheard what a shandy is but was too wealthy to have any of the actual ingredients on hand.
David handles the wine because I know nothing.
Sweetings, like many pubs, has likely seen its share of joys celebrated and sorrows drowned. When word made it from Germany that Aspirin had been patented in 1897, why wouldn't you get another round in?
I imagine nervous fingers tapping on the Sweeting bar, as news hurtled its way into England about a colossal defeat during the Second Boer War, leading to Black Week in 1899. Then the bemusement of hearing how the Boers fired a Christmas pudding at us with a note saying ‘Compliments of the season’, the very next week.
Speaking of dessert, ours is a sharply sliced cuboid of bread and butter pudding spiked with marmalade, evenly populated with steeped raisins, its top pitched with icing sugar. Asked if we’d like custard, ice cream or cream, we both turn towards each other with our shoulders hunched like school kids and unanimously ask for both. Among the myriad of things the walls of Sweetings have seen, this is probably nothing new.
Looking up, I see that same guy, still tucking into his linguine, now about as silky as shipping rope, in what Mike Daw would term ‘an advanced state of refreshment.’ Elsewhere, the damp clack of empty oyster shells onto the bed of ice can be heard between the clatter of steel, ceramic and glass, each punctuating a fervent conversation.
Heaving ourselves off our stools, fresh batches of hopefuls stand ready to replace us, which they swiftly do. The abruptness, offering no chance to soak in any sense of ceremony, feels quintessentially London in itself.
Sweetings feels more like an immortal organism. Like the underground, the intake and output of bodies doesn’t relent. However, now in my late 30s and 20 years since I last held my Mum’s hand (she’s dead) they’re no longer clammy. “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,” as Samuel Johnson quipped — places like Sweetings ensure you can maintain your energy levels.