There are people of legal drinking age out there whose entire life has held out the possibility of going to a gastropub. They could not begin to imagine the amazement, the delight – the appetite – that greeted the arrival of the Eagle in its new incarnation in early 1991.
In an Evening Standard article of 19 February of that year, in a section that included news of a rapprochement between Margaret, Duchess of Argyll and her only daughter Frances, Duchess of Rutland and speculation as to how Prince Charles and Princess Diana would celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary – as well as an assessment of how designer shops were weathering the recession – I reviewed the Eagle. I reported that two young chaps, Michael Belben and David Eyre (chef), who in the 1980s had been working at Smith’s and Melange restaurants in Covent Garden, had benefited from a cheap near end-of-lease deal in a Farringdon pub where décor was ‘practically non-existent’ but the food ‘notable and achievable within the confined kitchen and service space’.
