I HADN'T been in Central Station for a while so excuse me if I'm behind the times, but it seems to have improved quite a bit; better shops, cafés, restaurants, a calming sense of space.
Perhaps it's because I'm more used to Waverley in Edinburgh, which, despite its refurbishment, still has nowhere to get a bite worth eating. Of course, the compensation for travellers on the East Coast Line is that the recently improved King's Cross in London has decent food options (Leon), and upmarket shops - if, that is, you ignore the nationally ubiquitous and glacially slow "fast" self-checkouts at WH Smith, where confectionery forms an up-close-and-personal guard of honour around the restless customer.
I suppose that the triumphant phoenix risen from near ashes that is St Pancras showed that dowdy stations can be brilliantly transformed and offer an overall experience that beats airports hands-down. The rapacious companies that run our airports clearly look on them as a licence to print money. Stuck with boring hours to fill in the departure lounge, we can easily be parted from our money and have no alternative other than to pay egregious mark-ups. Although, if you should happen to find yourself cooling your heels for hours in Gatwick North terminal, as many of us Scots do, the Comptoir Libanais there is surprisingly cheap, quite authentic, and uses high-quality, fresh ingredients.
At Central Station, it took me a good 10 minutes, and a few conversations with helpful security guards and doormen, to eventually find the Alston, a steakhouse hidden down below a hopeful-looking coffee shop, in what was once Alston Street, a bustling thoroughfare that once linked Gordon Street with Argyle Street. I felt like a dummy when I got there because its presence was clearly no secret to anyone else. At 5.20pm, the place was absolutely heaving.
Scanning the menu, I found not a lot to stimulate my gastric juices or culinary curiosity. Steaks, burger, chicken breast, ubiquitous sea bass and bream, a risotto as a fig leaf to vegetarians ... it's all so familiar, like hundreds of other restaurants. So I ordered dutifully, not hugely excited, and with pretty low expectations. But actually, if you want a pretty standard package, well executed, in an ultra-central location, then the Alston has much to recommend it.
There was a well-disciplined neatness of presentation to our starters, a thread that ran throughout the meal, nothing fussy, just clean and fresh. A cylindrical smoked ham roulade lolling on a bed of emollient cauliflower purée, contrasted with over-enthusiastically pickled beetroot. Beef and Roquefort croquette was low on beef, high on potato, and fried to a rather too dark shade of amber, but it was pleasant enough to eat with its billowy cloud of horseradish cream.
Some might complain that there was only one small fillet of sea bream, but not me, because I liked the overall balance of the ensemble, with the fillet set on slices of golden fried potato, whole peas and pea purée, and capped with a golden tarragon and lemon Béarnaise sauce. The rib-eye steak was not so pretty, a masculine hunk compared to the femininity of the fish, and at £24, I could have handled a bit of a garnish - some watercress, a grilled tomato. But the dry-aged steak had a terrific flavour, came medium rare as requested, and was irreproachably tender. I ignored the pepper sauce, which was not peppery enough, and neither quite a reduced stock sauce or a cream sauce, but the chips which I was set to sample only (in the interests of my silhouette), were too good to ignore: skin-on, good internal consistency and flavour, crisply and cleanly fried. My resolve broke down.
The "deconstructed" white chocolate cheesecake, essentially quenelles of a light mousse on buttery crumbs, garnished with fresh raspberries, and a lusciously poached pear, swathed in a shortbread-like crumble, and served warm with crème Anglaise, made two excellent desserts.
The Alston's menu is neither cutting-edge nor creative, but the kitchen is doing a lot that's right, so there's more appeal to this restaurant than mere location.
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