Restaurant review: Paulette, Little Venice

On February 21, 2025February 27, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews2 Comments

Formosa Street, an enclave in Little Venice less than twenty minutes’ walk from Paddington Station, could be the platonic ideal of a London street. It has a little cafe, a chocolate shop, a ludicrously handsome Victorian pub with wood-panelled walls and glass compartments, with tiny doors linking them together. It has a little Italian restaurant that has been there thirty years, and a craft beer place two doors down, the past and the present coexisting cheerfully.

It doesn’t have a butcher, although there’s one just round the corner on Clifton Road. But tucked away seconds from the Tube station, one stop away from Paddington, a stone’s throw from the strikingly modernist St Saviour’s Church, it is a deeply pretty pocket of London that few people know about. If this was your neighbourhood, you would be very happy indeed. Of course, if this was your neighbourhood you would also be filthy rich.

I’ve frequented this part of the world, on and off, for many years. I think I ate in that Italian restaurant not long after it opened, and I’ve drunk in the handsome Victorian pub a fair few times. Just before lockdown, I tried out the craft beer place a couple of times, and I’ve admired the steeple of that modernist church on more occasions than I can recall. I am no closer to living there, or even pretending that I could do, but it’s nice to try to pretend.

Just before lockdown, five years ago, Zoë and I went for dinner at a small French restaurant on Formosa Street called Les Petits Gourmets. At the time, I had the idea of publishing some London reviews, of places close to Paddington, thinking they might be useful to people wanting somewhere good to eat before grabbing an off peak train home. And it might have been a good plan, if I hadn’t hatched it about a fortnight before people stopped taking trains in general, going to the office or indeed leaving their houses.

So I never wrote a review of Les Petits Gourmets, although that might have been for the best because it was small, eccentric and nuts. On arriving we were told that their oven had packed up, so we could have whatever we liked from the menu as long as it was something they could cook on the hob. The place was dark and atmospheric, our table tiny and cramped. Another table, weirdly shaped and right next to the bar, with a couple of high stools, was so bad that a couple came in, were offered the table, had a shouting match with the staff and stormed out.

I can’t remember anything about what I ate, but I do remember that. And I was tempted to publish a review, if only because it was so surreal, but what would have been the point? It was just a place you would never have heard of, and a review that wouldn’t have sent you rushing there, at a time when you couldn’t have rushed there anyway – even if, for whatever reason, a dingy spot with no working oven and some shocking tables was right up your alley.

I thought no more about Les Petits Gourmets, really, until last summer when I read a rave review in the Standard of a French restaurant in Little Venice called Paulette. I know that area, I thought. I wonder where it is? And then I checked the address, and thought Isn’t that where that weird French place used to be? And then I Googled some more and discovered that it was exactly where that used to be, and opened later in 2020. Les Petits Gourmets was an early casualty of the pandemic: perhaps the cost of fixing that oven was the final straw.

The review I read of Paulette made it sound like everything I had wanted its predecessor to be, so I made a booking there and on a drizzly Saturday morning I caught the train up into London, ready for a long overdue lunch with my cousin Luke, last seen as baffled as I was by supercool Haggerston spot Planque. Fun fact: both Planque and Paulette featured in Conde Nast Traveller‘s listicle last summer of London’s best on-trend French restaurants although, as we will see, they couldn’t be more different.

The walk from Paddington is a lovely one. You start out exiting the station right by the Paddington Basin and cross over it, right by the floating barge restaurants, walking past craft beer and pizza spots and impossibly spenny-looking modern apartment complexes. The route ducks under the grime and bustle of the Westway and then, suddenly, everything is beautiful: the streets widen and are flanked with gorgeous redbrick mansions, huge buildings made up of pinch-me-if-I-live-here flats. And then you’re at the canal, and you wonder how such a fetching residential area can be hiding in plain sight here, in Zone 1.

I stopped for a latte at the brilliant D1 Coffee, a stone’s throw from the waterway, and thought to myself that as usual I was trying to pass myself off as congruous in a neighbourhood far, far above my station. I chatted to the couple next to me about giving up smoking – something I did twenty years ago and still think of as one of my greatest achievements – and as we did, countless cosmopolitan types ambled past, walking dogs or just chatting happily. One was carrying a MUBI tote, and I wondered how it had happened that I’d wound up living in a postcode so far from my tribe. It’s almost as if I just hadn’t tried hard enough to make something of myself.

I got to Paulette before Luke did, and it was unrecognisable from the room I’d eaten unsuccessfully in five years before. Still eccentric, yes: all mismatched patterns on the walls and ceilings, mismatched cloths on the tables, mismatched light fittings, all maximalist and unashamed. But it was bright, cheery and welcoming. Even with the canary yellow awning out, light flooded in from the full length windows and all the tables were full of people who seemed profoundly happy with their life choices. I ordered a kir while I waited for my cousin, and it was sweet sunshine, a liquid escape from rainy London. Even noticing that the gorgeous Victorian boozer opposite was closed for renovations couldn’t dent my joie de vivre.

Nor could the discovery, when Luke turned up and ordered a Meteor Zero, that he was off the sauce. He explained that he’d bust his hip and that alcohol interfered with his rehabilitation regime: news to me, as I’ve always found Dr. Booze an invaluable consultant I’ve involved in my recovery from pretty much anything affecting me.

I thought it would bother Luke, a man who runs more marathons in a year than I’ve eaten Marathon bars in my lifetime, but he was surprisingly sanguine about it. “I figure everything goes through a fallow period” he told me later in the pub, showing a kind of Zen perspective I’d have loved to have twenty years ago when I was his age: come to think of it, I haven’t attained that mindset even now.

That meant that I had to forego the delights and dilemmas of choosing a bottle from the enormous wine list, seemingly covering all of France in compendious detail. But it wasn’t all bad – just under twenty wines were available by the glass, a great spread including half a dozen dispensed using a Coravin. I picked a Sancerre, which was terrific, and we started doing a bad job of making our choices from the menu and a much better job of catching up.

The menu was a tad lopsided, with about a dozen starters and half that of mains, but everything on there was tempting. Many of the things I’d read about in advance and hoped to encounter, like a Roscoff onion tarte tatin with mascarpone, were missing in action, but even so the challenge was very much what you missed out on, as much as what you picked. On another day you would have wound up hearing about the classic onion soup, the scallops or the halibut with sauce Meunière, but I will have to try them next time, assuming they haven’t been whipped off the menu by then.

As it was Luke and I agreed to share a few things to try and cover as much as we could, helped by pricing which encouraged you to try a bit of everything. Starters tended to be at or around the fifteen pound mark, with mains mostly between thirty and forty quid. But everything was so fabulous, and generous, that I didn’t object to that in the slightest.

We kicked off proceedings with a small selection of charcuterie, which was easily enough for both of us. All of it was marvellous, from the bresaola to the pork loin but especially the coppa, dried and intense, and a doozy of a jambon de Bayonne: again, dry and coarse, which very much said tiens ma bière to both Serrano and Parma ham. This came with bread (which should be a given but isn’t always), butter (which was a very welcome surprise) and, best of all, a ramekin containing a deeply acceptable quantity of sharp, tart cornichons.

Fourteen pounds for all that, and for a pound more our second starter was every bit as stellar. I love pâté en croute, and Paulette’s version was the best I’ve tried – a glorious slab of heaven, golden burnished pastry housing coarse pâté, shot through with dark prunes. On occasion I’ve had this kind of dish in Paris and it’s been painfully close to Pedigree Chum, but no such worries here: no dodgy jelly, just densely packed meat – pork and duck in this case – topped with yet more pickles and a quenelle of exceptional whole grain mustard. A very well-dressed salad completed an impeccable plate of food.

I wish I’d had one of these to myself, but to do that I’d have had to go without the charcuterie. This is the problem with sharing food, isn’t it: you always end up wanting twice as much of everything, everywhere, all at once. I was about to start a sentence with Next time, but I’ll try to stop myself or I’ll be doing it for the rest of the review. Truth be told, even by this point the only question in my mind was when exactly that next time would be. It was already a given that it would happen.

I gave Luke first pick of the main courses and, torn between the fillet of beef and the bourguignon, he eventually chose the latter. He chose extremely well. The pan brought to his table was a one-stop shop of pure happiness – a deep, reduced sauce full of wine and care, with a few waxy potatoes, plenty of mushrooms and a transverse beast of a carrot, heftily substantial and yet superbly cooked.

But of course, none of that gets top billing in the name of the dish, and this all comes down to the beef itself. I’m used to having this dish with shin or chuck, but Paulette opted for beef cheeks and, with hindsight, it was an inspired choice. The food writer Harry Eastwood once said that cheek was perfect for this dish as, in her words, “the meat surrenders completely”. I can’t improve on that description, so I’ve nicked it instead.

And it’s true, but only if the kitchen is absolutely on top of its game and the beef is braised to the point where any gelatinous quality is gone, replaced with that terrific stickiness where the beef and the sauce become a symbiotic dream team. That’s what had happened here, and it was a wondrous thing. Trying a forkful I thought back to my friend Graeme’s bourguignon at Côte the previous month, and the difference between good and great. The difference, it turns out, is nine quid and forty miles.

“This is the best French food I can remember eating” said Luke. I’m a relatively frequent visitor to France, but I could see what he meant.

If I had been Luke, I would have wished that I’d saved some bread to mop up that final layer of sauce coating the bottom of the pan. But if I’d been Luke he’d probably have a forty inch waist and far less success online dating and would get over the disappointment of busting his hip (which would be more likely to happen by, say, getting out of bed awkwardly) by medicating with the finest mid-price reds the restaurant had to offer. Instead I offered him some of my frites, and after refusing twice – he is Canadian after all, so awfully polite – he took me up on my offer.

I’ve seen quite a few reviews online talk about how Paulette does the capital’s best frites. They might or they might not: I’ve had nowhere near enough frites in London to be qualified to judge, but they were up there with the best frites I’ve had in this country or any other, irregular, golden, salted and decidedly moreish. They were so good I wasn’t sad that I didn’t get to try the gratin Dauphinois, and frites have to be pretty damned good for that to happen.

My frites accompanied my order from the specials board, duck breast cooked pink, sliced and served simply with a boat of what was described as a duck velouté, in practice one of those ultra-reduced, fantastically concentrated sauces that French cuisine seems to do better than almost anybody else.

I’ve had duck breast many, many times in my life and a lot of the time, afterwards, I wonder if I’m doing it because I think I should like it rather than because I do. It’s often a tad tough, a smidge fatty, somewhat poorly rested: much like me, most weekday mornings. This was more like me after a full day in Nirvana Spa, utterly relaxed, thoroughly cosseted, treated like a king.

The analogy breaks down at that point, because this duck was also enormously tasty and I imagine most people wouldn’t be able to get enough of it. But it was good while it lasted.

By this point I had moved on to a Saumur, which was perfect with the duck: Paulette has the sort of outstanding staff who will compliment you on each of your wine choices even though you’re the poor schmuck muddling your way through the list of wines by the glass.

Luke and I decided to eat as Frenchly as possible, which meant a cheese course and then some dessert: the wine list distinguishes, winningly, between “cheese wines” and “dessert wines” so I nabbed something from the former section, a 1986 Muscadet. I have no doubt the Coravin was involved here, and the result was stunning, an amber marvel with a hint of sherry sweetness, outstanding complexity and length. A 50ml pour, in this case, was plenty.

Paulette does a small or large assiette de fromages with three or five cheeses respectively, and they are in principle a deli too, so I did wonder whether you could pick which cheeses you had. When our server authoritatively told us you got a Comte, a truffled brie and a Saint Nectaire I realised this was a choice best left to the experts, so that’s what we had.

The picture here probably doesn’t fully convey this, but it was a generous wodge of each, easily enough to share without needing a scalpel and a protractor. They were all outstanding: the Comte with all the crystalline grit you would want, the Saint Nectaire, not a cheese I’d ever seek out, bringing a savoury depth to justify its seat at the table.

But the truffled brie – oh my goodness. Luke and I agreed that we shared a suspicion about truffle being brought out to zhuzh up the ordinary, but in this case it turned a gooey, creamy delight into a total showstopper. As with the charcuterie, this came with a generous helping of bread but once we had finished all of the bread and nearly all of the cheese the twinkliest of our servers returned with a couple more slices, urging us to use them to clean up the very last of the brie. We did as we were told.

Normally I would have a different dessert to my dining companion, but I figured we’d got through a decent range of dishes already and I’d seen the chocolate mousse being carried past to other tables and decided there was no way I was leaving without trying it. I mean, just look at it in the picture below: a stegosaurus of a thing, plump and shiny, with a spine of caramelised hazelnuts sitting in a pastel-green lake of pistachio crème Anglaise. How could I not order that? How could anybody?

And it tasted every bit as beautiful as it looked. By now I’m used to chocolate mousses in fancy Spanish places where they drizzle it with extra virgin olive oil and pop some salt crystals on top, the modish way to revamp a staple. But this had no interest in playing those tricks, so like everything else at Paulette it was a classic rendition of a classic dish, prepared by a kitchen that revered the classics.

Don’t get me wrong – there is a place for deconstructing, reconstructing and reinventing, and I’m a fan of those things as much as anyone. But whatever that place is it isn’t Paulette, I’m very glad to say. This was a dark, glossy miracle – so smooth, almost not aerated at all, and I wished every spoonful could have lasted hours. The final spoonful, as it always does with such dishes, came too soon, and I found myself wishing there was some sweet equivalent of bread I could use to mop up those last bits of crème Anglaise. Maybe that, rather than ruining burgers, is the point of brioche.

When you book lunch at Paulette you get that standard issue we want your table back in X hours gubbins that London restaurants so often do. But none of that happened here, and over three hours after I ordered that kir pretty much every table was occupied by somebody new despite it still being mid-afternoon, the evening service around the corner.

I’ve never understood restaurant reviewers who insist on eating at a place twice before writing a review – mainly because they need to get over themselves – but if I could have eaten at Paulette again that evening I would have seriously considered it. But the craft beer place a couple of doors down was calling to us, and the pub after that, so it was time to reluctantly pay for the wonderful time we had had. Our bill for two, all that food, a couple of beers for Luke and five different glasses of wine for me, came to just over two hundred and ten pounds, including a 13.5% service charge. It felt as much like a bargain as I suspect any meal will this year.

Later on, Luke and I were in the Bear, just around the corner from Paddington, having one last drink and comparing notes before going our separate ways.

“The only thing that stops it getting the highest mark, for me” said Luke, “was that it just lacked that thing that would make it a truly transcendental experience. That and the bread, I guess, the bread could have been better.”

I knew what Luke meant, but I also suspected that looking at Paulette that way missed an important point, which was that Paulette had no interest in being that kind of restaurant or delivering that kind of experience. It was more interested in transporting you completely by delivering something unfussy and unfancy but, in its way, truly outstanding. Paulette was about as good an example of this kind of restaurant as it’s possible to find, and I loved it. Absolutely loved it, unreservedly, from start to finish.

It’s twenty minutes from Paddington, and Paddington is thirty minutes from Reading. Just think about that: you could be at Reading station, and within an hour you could be eating in this place. If I don’t do so a couple more times this year, I will be extremely surprised, not to mention deeply disappointed. I know most of my London reviews, lately, have been of spots in the centre where you hop on the Elizabeth Line to get there, very much a tribute to the march of progress in the capital. But this? Simply timeless.

Paulette – 9.3
18 Formosa Street, London, W9 1EE
020 72862715

https://www.paulettelondon.com

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Restaurant review: Brutto, Clerkenwell

On November 15, 2024November 20, 2025 By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

Every year, without fail, a handful of new U.K. restaurants get hyped beyond measure. Every critic goes there, usually within the space of a fortnight, and every critic raves in their own hyperbolic way. Those places become impossible to book, if booking them were ever possible in the first place, and move into the heart of smugness: proper “if you know, you know” territory. These London restaurants – it’s always London, of course – are invariably hailed as evidence that it’s the most exciting food city in the entire world, mainly by restaurant reviewers living in London and writing for the national papers (or, perhaps more understandably, the Evening Standard).

So last year, it was all about Mountain in Soho and Tomos Parry’s cooking over fire (“can a dish be too good for itself?” wibbled Tim Hayward in the FT). Or Bouchon Racine, Henry Harris’ bistro. Jay Rayner described himself as a “huge dribbling admirer”, presumably to put people off booking a table, or for that matter ever eating again. And of course, there was Kolae, but you already know whether that’s good, don’t you?

And this year? Everyone has lost their collective marbles over Josephine Bouchon, Claude Bosi’s earthy Lyonnais restaurant on the Fulham Road, and Giles Coren, Tom Parker Bowles and Jay Rayner all went to the Hero in Maida Vale seemingly in the same fortnight. Giles Coren dined with Camilla Long, which means that for once he might have had an even worse time than his dining companion. I have a friend who everybody loves, who never has a bad word to say about anybody: you should hear his vitriol on the subject of Camilla Long.

Of course, the hype beast to end all hype beasts, this year, has been the Devonshire, the Soho pub run by the chap behind Flat Iron and Oisin Rogers, the closest thing the U.K. has to a celebrity pub landlord who isn’t Al Murray. Nearly all of the U.K.’s broadsheet restaurant reviewers descended on the Devonshire, mystifyingly all being able to land a table despite it being nigh-on impossible to do so, unless you’re famous. It’s almost as if there’s one rule for civilians and one rule for everyone else. Almost.

Coren even went all meta, writing in his review about being desperate to file his copy first despite seeing Tom Parker Bowles and Charlotte Ivers in there literally at the same time as him (Grace Dent, always at the cutting edge, finally got round to it last month). Still, nobody was going to match Coren for overstatement: “It’s just insane, what they’re doing” he gushed, about a pub taking the unprecedented steps of serving beer and cooking food.

It would be temping to review The Devonshire, if I could ever get a table. I used to know Rogers, a little, over a decade ago, and even got drunk with him a couple of times; he’s enormous fun, and a very canny operator. You have to take your hat off to someone who has always managed to keep in with whoever is making the weather in the notoriously bitchy world of London food, and Osh has managed simultaneously to be on good terms with everybody from Fay Maschler to the restaurant bloggers of the late Noughties and early Tens, all the way through to those tacky toffs from Topjaw. He’s always known exactly who to have onside, and is possibly even better at doing that than he is at running a pub.

But actually, I’d be more likely to go to his previous place, the Guinea Grill, which everybody thought did the best Guinness in London before Rogers jumped ship, and which also does the kind of steaks, puddings and pies people associate with the likes of Rules. All that without having to bump into the likes of Ed Sheeran? Count me in. And it’s interesting to me, that: you have places like Rules, or St John, that have been there for ever, and you have places like the Devonshire that are the new upstarts. Between those two types of restaurant? Sometimes it feels like there’s nothing at all.

But how can restaurants ever go from being the hot new thing to becoming institutions when everybody’s attention spans have been destroyed by social media, influencers and restaurant critics desperately craving the new? And what becomes of the flavour of the month when things settle down and the bandwagon rolls on to the next place, and the place after that? That’s why this week, after meeting Zoë from work up in the big smoke, catching the Elizabeth Line to Farringdon with what felt like a thousand West Ham fans and gulping down a handful of Belgian beers at the beautiful Dovetail pub, we mooched across to Brutto for our evening reservation there.

Brutto, you see, was one of The Restaurants Of 2021. Critics flocked to it that year, not necessarily because a trattoria modelled on the restaurants of Florence was what the capital was crying out for, but because this was the comeback restaurant of restaurateur Russell Norman. Norman’s Polpo group of restaurants, fifteen years ago – no reservations, small plates, typewritten menus on brown paper, Duralex glasses – probably did as much as any other to change the way people ate in London. It’s just insane what they did, as Giles Coren might have ineptly said.

I went to Polpo a little just after it opened, and offshoot Polpetto after that, and they were brilliant places to eat, although they never entirely overcame that feeling, when the bill arrived, that you’d spent too much on too little. But then came the unwise expansion, including branches in Bristol and Brighton, and then came the crash: Norman made his exit in 2020, and now only two branches remain.

And then, pretty much a year ago, Norman died suddenly and was mourned by seemingly everybody in the food world. Yet even if you never ate at one of his places, the likelihood is that in the last fifteen years you have eaten at least somewhere that has done something differently because of one of Norman’s restaurants from all that time ago, and that in itself is an interesting and far-reaching legacy.

Reading all that back it sounds like a bit of a downer, but I find it hard to imagine anybody walking into Brutto would feel down for long. I can think of few dining rooms that make you feel happier to be in them – it was simultaneously snug and buzzy, with tables full of people thoroughly enjoying their Saturday nights and others sitting up at the bar, making the most of Brutto’s fabled £5 negronis.

The dining room is kind of split level, and I guess the room at the front would be the one you’d ideally want to be sitting in, with its banquette and framed pictures arranged haphazardly on the teal wall behind (“it’s like Alto Lounge, but not shit” was Zoë’s take). But we were closer to the bar at a surprisingly good table next to a pillar, and although there was a distinct hubbub, and an effortlessly cool soundtrack seemingly pitched at Gen X duffers like me, it was never uncomfortably loud.

It really was a marvellous place, from the gingham tablecloths to the napkin lightshades to the candles stuffed into wicker-chianti bottles, and I loved it. It had that feeling of otherness I adore, the restaurant as a cocoon, where for the next couple of hours you could kid yourself that you’d walk out of the door at the end of your meal and be somewhere completely different.

It was, however, and I might as well get this out of the way now, dark. It started out as atmospheric, but as the evening went on it started to reach Dans Le Noir levels of stygian gloom. A lovely spot to be in, to drink and talk, but the practicalities of doing some of the things you ideally want to do in a restaurant, like read your menu or see what you were eating, were severely curtailed.

A solitary votive candle in the middle of our table wasn’t really going to help with that, even if the staff – who were on it throughout – replaced it very efficiently when it sputtered and went out. I got told off for getting the torch out on my phone to try and read the menu. Zoë told me that I was ruining the atmosphere for everybody, and I’ve since discovered that this is allegedly a boomer thing to do, for which I can only apologise.

Once Zoë had taken some pictures with her phone, in night mode, naturally, and AirDropped them over to me, I managed to get a decent look at the menu, which was of course typewritten. It was everything you’d want it to be, mostly: compact, affordable and interesting. Starters were mostly under a tenner, pasta dishes were closer to twenty and so were the secondi, with the exception of Florentine steak which is sold by weight. I think in the past I’ve seen these listed up on a blackboard, so as to say that when they’re gone they’re gone. Maybe they’d already gone, because our server didn’t mention them to us.

The thing you don’t notice on the menu, at first, is that there’s no fish to be seen anywhere. I saw it written on a mirror in the dining room that Brutto doesn’t serve fish, and although it’s often not my first choice it was still odd to see it completely excluded. It gave the dishes on offer a certain brownish hue, or that could have been the dim lighting, but I suppose it worked on a nippy evening with London well on its way to winter. And it’s not as if I minded, much. The negroni was fierce and medicinal and, lest we forget, only a fiver and, on top of those Belgian beers from earlier on, positively knocked the edges off the day.

I don’t sense that Brutto’s menu has changed enormously since it was first reviewed three years ago, because many of the dishes on offer were talked about in those initial reviews. One definitely was – coccoli, which translates as “cuddles”, and is little fried bits of dough with prosciutto and a small pot of tangy stracchino cheese. Remember when I said that these restaurants attract bucketloads of hype? Jimi Famurewa, then of the Standard said that they were “one of the year’s best dishes”.

I don’t know about that, but they were rather enjoyable. More doughnut than doughball, and pleasant enough with little slivers of ham and a small dollop of the cheese; there wasn’t enough stracchino, but I imagine there never is. But the problem with hype, however old it is, is that it almost sets you up against something. I bet the people who raved about these would have sneered at good old Pizza Express. It reminded me of a restaurant in Shoreditch I used to love called Amici Miei which did a similar dish to this, but far better and completely unsung. But then it hadn’t been opened by Russell Norman, that was the problem.

The other starter was three things that in isolation are hard to beat. Very fine, extremely salty anchovies, with decent salted butter and sourdough from St John just down the road. It’s impossible to argue with this really, even if it involves no cooking, and all three things were good. Zoë adored it, I wasn’t convinced it was really any more than the sum of its parts. In fairness though, this dish was just over a tenner and even in Andalusia seven anchovies of this quality might well set you back more than that.

By this point we were on the red wine, The wine list is all Italian, with lots to enjoy, provided you can read the bastard thing. Bottles start at thirty-six pounds and ascend quickly into three figures from there, and we settled for a Montepulciano closer to the shallow end for sixty-two pounds. which retails for eighteen quid online. Was it worth sixty-two pounds? We’ve established over eleven years that I don’t know a lot about wine, but I’d say maybe not.

For me the pasta dishes were probably Brutto’s greatest strength, and easily the thing I most enjoyed. I’d been tempted by pappardelle with rabbit, but in the end the classic tagliatelle with ragu was too hard to resist. And it was as close to perfect as this dish gets in this country, fantastic al dente ribbons of pasta and a rich, sticky ragu that hugged its curves closely. I’ve always been somewhat sniffy about this widely-held belief that there should be more pasta than sauce, but eating this, for once, I got the point. Everything felt like it was completely in order, in absolutely the right proportions.

Because Brutto is a homage to the trattoria of Italy, they left a bowl of grated Parmesan at your table, with a spoon. But because we were still in London, there wasn’t a lot of Parmesan in it.

For me if anything, Zoë chose even better. Her gramigna, a little spiral shape from Emilia-Romagna, came – as it does in that region – tumbled with sausage and friarelli and was a real joy. But don’t be fooled by the brightness of these pictures from Zoë’s iPhone: by this point it was getting more and more difficult to see what was going on. Even so, these two dishes, to me, highlighted that when it came to pasta dishes restaurants like Brutto or Bancone are still light years ahead of well-intentioned pretenders like Little Hollows in Bristol or bandwagon jumpers like Maidenhead’s Sauce And Flour.

I complained recently that Reading was still lacking a really good Italian restaurant and someone popped up and said “what about Vesuvio?”. And I said that I was looking for somewhere more genuinely Italian and less like a better reimagining of Prezzo, with more interesting secondi. But actually, I got that wrong: what’s really missing is brilliant pasta like this. Pepe Sale had that, back in the day. So did San Sicario. But since then, this kind of carb-centric comfort has been missing from Reading, and it’s a poorer place for it.

Speaking of secondi, to eat that course at Brutto it does help if you like beef. Three of the options are beef-driven (possibly four, depending on what’s in the bollito misto) and the roasted squash, virtuous though it doubtless was, just didn’t appeal. I had chosen the peposo, a slow-cooked stew of beef shin in a sticky, reduced sauce shot through with whole black peppercorns. And I liked it – it sort of reminded me of a stifado, although with no reliance on tomato or those maverick shallots that make the Greek dish such a delight.

But you know how you feel when you see a picture of a moment you don’t fully remember and you’re not sure if the photograph itself is inventing a memory you didn’t really have? Usually that experience dates back to childhood, but I have it when I look at the picture Zoë took of my main course. I know this is what I ate, the photo has my hand in it and the date stamp to prove it. But for me it was just a pool of blackness. You never quite knew what you were eating, or whether this would be your last big chunk of beef. I’ve always understood the saying that you eat with your eyes, but maybe not as well as I did after having this dish at Brutto. And however convivial the atmosphere was, this is where it took something away for me.

I didn’t need a great view of the roast potatoes I’d ordered on the side to know that they weren’t the best roast potatoes. Decent enough, but lacking that contrast of crunch and fluff that would have come if they’d been parboiled, and scuffed up, and cooked properly in really hot fat. Without that, they were just ballast.

Zoë infinitely preferred her main, which was a variation on the same theme. The same roast potatoes, which she viewed more kindly than I had. A slab of pink roast beef, the fat on the outside mellow and puckered, sitting in a little pool of jus. It needed the peas with pancetta that she ordered with it – I’d have liked these à la Française, with a little cream, although I know that’s missing the point in a Florentine trattoria. Anyway Zoë loved it, although she did admit that it was a tad dry. But if there’s anything our marriage proves – six months and counting – it’s that she has far lower standards than I do.

We had a fair bit of wine left, so we drank that and chatted about all sorts before making any decisions about desserts. Now Zoë works in London she is there every Saturday, and usually knocks off at eight o’clock, so by the time our evening begins, most weeks, it’s time for bed. A rare date night in the capital was a precious thing, and so neither of us was in a rush to bring it to an end. But desserts also meant digestivi, and that meant a Frangelico for her and an Amaro del Capo for me. It’s one of my favourite amaros, with something like 29 botanicals, though the one that leaps to the surface for me is mint.

I could have nursed that for some time, and maybe even had another, but the dessert menu only had a few things on it (putting pear and almond cake on there twice, once with ice cream and once without isn’t fooling anybody). Anyway, one of the items on the dessert menu was tiramisu, which meant that we were both contractually obligated to have one. Is it the dessert I order most often when I’m on duty? It definitely feels that way, and Brutto’s is up there with the best I’ve had – miles better than Little Hollows’, better than Sonny Stores‘, better than anything I’ve had in Reading, even including the wonder of Sarv’s Slice or the sadly departed Buon Appetito.

It properly contained multitudes, managing to be substantial yet airy, innocent yet boozy, simultaneously just the right size and nowhere near big enough. I loved it, and it reminded me that on the many occasions that I skip dessert when eating on duty I’m leaving the play before the final act, taking the book back to the library with the last fifty pages untouched. Brutto understands that a good meal has a beginning, a middle and an end, and that tiramisu was a more than worthy way to bring the curtain down.

With all that done, it was time to settle up and pray that the Elizabeth Line could get us back to Paddington before we were forced to catch one of those final trains back to the ‘Ding, the ones everybody refers to as the Burger King Express.

Our meal – a couple of negronis each, that bottle of wine, four courses each and a pair of digestivi – came to just over two hundred and fifty pounds, including an optional 12.5% tip. I know that’s a fair amount of money, but we had plenty of food and didn’t stint on the wine. Personally, I think Brutto is keen value, although probably more so in its starters and pasta than in its mains or wine list. I could have spent less and enjoyed myself just as much, and if I went again I imagine I would.

But would I go again? That’s the question, isn’t it. And it prompts the time-honoured answer, which goes like this. London is so blessed with restaurants – there are easily a handful of other great places to eat less than a ten minute walk from Brutto – that places have to be truly amazing to keep you visiting time and again. That drives quality, I’m sure, and it makes restaurants work hard for custom.

And maybe that also goes to answer the other question, of why it’s hard for anything to become an institution when somewhere else is always, always coming down the tracks. Back when I was on Tinder (what a fun three months that was) I deplored the way it effectively made you channel hop human beings, with their own lives and aspirations and back stories. Whatever. Next! But the way the food media works does the same thing with a lot of restaurants: one minute you’re the hottest ticket in town, the next you’re old hat.

So I had a lovely meal at Brutto and it taught me a lot about what restaurants do at their best and their worst. I have rarely felt, in a restaurant in the U.K., more like I was part of something brilliant and bigger than me. But ultimately one of the many things that united us that night was being together in the darkness. If that’s not a metaphor for something I don’t know what is. Maybe I’m just too old for all that.

Brutto felt like a neighbourhood restaurant in search of a neighbourhood. And speaking of neighbourhoods, if somewhere like Brutto opened in Reading you can bet I would be there on its opening night, and often after that. The fact that Reading can’t attract and maintain restaurants like this really puts the lie to all the old tut spouted by the likes of Hicks Baker that the town centre isn’t dying on its arse.

But while Reading still doesn’t have places like this, it still has that one thing Reading-haters always extol the virtues of: a train station you can use to get anywhere else. You could do a lot worse than make a reservation, hop on a train and find yourself here, in a place that isn’t quite Italy, isn’t quite London, but most definitely isn’t Reading. I know that’s not exactly hype, but it’s the best I can do.

Brutto – 8.4
35-37 Greenhill Rents, London, EC1M 6BN
020 45370928

https://brutto.co.uk

Restaurant review: The Drapers Arms, Islington

On October 4, 2024October 6, 2024 By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

I was meeting Aileen, a very dear old friend, in London for lunch and she gave me carte blanche to pick wherever I wanted. “You’re the food expert”, her message said. “You choose.” And I have to say, that was more difficult than usual; I have a list of London places I want to get round to, but lots of them didn’t seem right for this. I didn’t want us to sit at a cramped table somewhere in Soho, elbows battling, or up at a bar watching an open kitchen. I might go to the edgy places with my cousin Luke, but lunch with Aileen required somewhere in the image of our friendship: comfortable, classy, unrushed with a long history. Somewhere worth celebrating.

Aileen and I, you see, have been friends for well over a decade. Long before I started writing this blog I used to write another – not about restaurants, about something else – and somehow Aileen chanced upon it. And somehow, I’m not even sure how, we went from writer and reader to firm friends. I don’t think I could possibly have appreciated at the time how fortunate I was about that. Because a few years later my marriage and my life imploded and things got almost impossibly hard and Aileen, arguably more than anyone, was the person who kept me together.

In the dark moments when nobody else was there, or (more likely) they had all gone to sleep, Aileen showed up for me time and time again. She always had the same mantra, which I railed against but over time discovered was true: this is a phase. It’s a phase, and it will pass. And it was, and it did, and she never once said I told you so, even though she could have done.

I like to tell people that she saved my life, and she likes to reply that I’m talking nonsense. She might be right, because she nearly always is, but if we hadn’t become friends I don’t know who or where I would be now: I almost certainly wouldn’t be here.

It was a huge honour for me that she was at my wedding earlier in the year, a wedding that might not have happened had I not met her. Late in the evening, when the guests were thinning out, we sat together outside the Lyndhurst and had a good old gas, as if the intervening months had never happened. And the next morning I managed to catch her in the hotel bar before she headed home to Milton Keynes, and that easy, joyous conversation was one of my highlights of the whole weekend. I told her we should do lunch in London soon. So we agreed to, and all I had to do was find somewhere suitable for the occasion.

I ended up choosing the Drapers Arms in Islington, because it just felt right. It’s been going for well over twenty years, one of the generation of London gastropubs that includes the celebrated Anchor & Hope near Waterloo, and in that time it has become an institution. It held a Bib Gourmand from Michelin for much of the last decade, losing it in 2018, but it still featured in this year’s list of the U.K.’s top 100 gastropubs. But the thing that most cements its status as an institution is that nobody talks about it online, because nobody needs to. You won’t find a recent review of it online, and the London restaurant bloggers stopped name checking it a long time ago.

All that meant that although I’ve always wanted to go, I didn’t have a very clear idea what to expect. Aileen and I wandered there, strolling up Camden Passage and looking at all the stalls and boutiques, before heading across to Upper Street and then ambling off the main drag, onto side streets filled with houses you wished you lived in. On the way I went past various restaurants I’d heard of – the likes of Bancone clone Noci, Alsatian brasserie Bellanger and regional specialists Hainan House – all of which have been reviewed by somebody a darned sight more recently than the Drapers Arms has.

It’s a handsome, imposing building, a three-storey, powder blue beauty, and going in the front room was flooded with sunshine from the windows and glass-panelled doors. There were unoccupied tables at the front, and I was hoping our reservation was at one of them, but instead we were led to a room further back which was dingier and less agreeable. Almost every table was taken, and we were seated at possibly the worst one there – equidistant from the terrace at the back or those big windows out front, starved of sunshine.

I plonked myself on a Thonet-style bentwood chair that didn’t entirely feel as if it could deal with my weight at the start of the meal, let alone the end. Around us all the tables were packed with loud, lively, chattering groups, and there was nothing to soak up the sound. I took a picture of the room much later on, which makes it look nicer than it was.

But maybe all that is a tad grumpy. After all it was busy, which you want somewhere to be, and the fact remained that it was an extremely attractive pub, even if we had the restaurant equivalent of the worst house on a good street. I especially loved the emerald-coloured bar, and a print on the wall advertising HP Sauce in the proper bottles.

“Mark brought some home from the supermarket recently in a squeezy plastic bottle and I made him take it back” said Aileen, talking about her husband. “It doesn’t taste the same when it’s not in a glass bottle. I reckon it’s thinner, too.” This, I realised, was one of many reasons why I loved the woman.

The menu changes every day and they publish it on the website, so it was much as I’d expected. It’s curious how some menus present you with very difficult choices while some, despite making all the right noises, are devoid of dilemmas. I would say that, however well it read, the Drapers Arms menu was the latter. Nine starters, all of which seemed to be either gutsy and rustic or, for my money, a little too virtuous. It was all a tad binary for me. You had the same number of mains, although four of them – the fun ones – were to be shared between two.

That made the whole thing a little more restrictive than I’d have liked and if you didn’t like offal or bone marrow, both of which made an appearance, I think you might have found things trickier still. Starters generally clustered between eight and fifteen pounds, mains started just shy of twenty but climbed, for the sharing dishes, up to ninety quid.

While we weighed things up Aileen ordered a negroni and I asked for a Bloody Mary, we clinked glasses and celebrated the prospect of a long lunch with a great friend. They didn’t ask me how spicy I wanted the Bloody Mary, which gave me confidence that it would be good. It was both spicy and very, very good.

It had been far too long since I’d had lunch with Aileen, and I didn’t realise that she was excited about featuring in the blog. “I’ve wanted to do this for ages!” she said. “And I don’t want you using a pseudonym for me, either.” Chatting away, I realised that we both had many of the same criteria when it came to restaurants getting a gold star or nul points. When our bread turned up, it turned out we both had a bugbear about fridge cold butter (Aileen checked it and thought it was okay, for my money it was still a little on the cold side).

My starter was a bisque, and Aileen rested her hand briefly against the outside of the bowl. “I don’t like it when hot food comes in a cold dish” she said. I hadn’t ever considered it, but she had a point.

The problem with the bisque, though, wasn’t one of temperature per se. It was a tasty dish where almost everything worked, but it wasn’t quite the sum of its parts. I loved the depth of the bisque and the crab meat tumbled through it. Spiking the whole thing with dots of deep green oil and red flecks of espelette pepper gave the whole thing contrast and depth.

The problem, and I never thought I’d hear myself saying this, was the octopus: there were a few pieces in the bisque and I just wasn’t sure, in terms of flavour or texture, whether they added enough to be worth it. This dish was fifteen pounds, and I couldn’t help thinking it might have been better, and been better value, without the octopus.

“Another thing that annoys me, while we’re at it” I said to Aileen, “is dishes like soup appearing in shallow bowls like this. It just means it’s really hard to get to all of it, and it goes cold quicker.”

“I agree with that” said Aileen. I cleaned up the rest of my bisque with some of the bread, which was fulfilling one of its most noble purposes: the edible jay cloth for sauce removal. The bread was okay, by the way: two big slices of sourdough and two pieces of baguette is hardly highway robbery for three pounds, but it wasn’t the most exciting.

Aileen’s starter was the kind of dish I would never order in a million years, and a great advert for bringing people with you to review restaurants whose tastes are not the same as yours. It was a bean salad with coriander, chillies and datterini tomatoes, served in a sort of filo pastry basket. Aileen loved it – the flavours worked well and the beans had a nice amount of bite. I had a forkful, which confirmed that it was indeed the kind of dish I would never order in a million years. I didn’t feel like there was anything bringing a fun factor to the plate, but that probably tells you more about me. It also felt steep at eleven quid.

Aileen is planning to retire at the end of the year, and was telling me how she plans to take over more of the cooking from her husband. This dish struck me as having a hint of Ottolenghi about it, and Aileen said she’d tried making some of his recipes. I’ve never followed her example: in my experience, they always seem to involve lots of ingredients and hours of processes, so perhaps they’re best left to the retired.

“Have you ever been to an Ottolenghi?” she said.

“Yes, just the once. I was at this event to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the Cable Street Riots, because my then girlfriend knew someone who was in a Yiddish marching band.” This sentence, by the way, sums up perfectly how very strange my life was in the latter half of 2016.

“There was a march, and a demonstration, and lots of placards and Jeremy Corbyn was one of the people making a speech. It was so boring that we sloped off to the Ottolenghi in Spitalfields and they managed to fit us in. It was all right, but it felt like a glorified salad bar.”

This starter, to me, felt like the kind of thing you’d have at a glorified salad bar.

But no matter. Both of us had chosen far more substantial mains and had ordered a bottle of Gamay to go with them: initially I thought Aileen might have insisted on just having wines by the glass, but that negroni had persuaded her to throw caution to the wind. It was thirty-one pounds, so very much at the shallow end of the wine list, but the list went deeper than at many restaurants.

“That one said 300, and for a moment I thought it was the price” said Aileen.

“No, that is the price.”

“But this is a pub!”

“Well, yes. And no.”

My main course was a sure sign that summer was long gone and that winter, as Leonard Cohen once put it, was tuning up. Lamb faggot and celeriac purée sounded like a glorious, fortifying treat and I was very glad Aileen hadn’t stuck a pin in it, because I always let my dining companions choose first. On paper it was beautiful, and at first sight it was every bit as appealing – a huge faggot, a splodge of mash, a moat of sticky gravy and one accent of not-beige, a crowning garnish of kalette tops. It was a dish to be enjoyed in a cosy pub, even one with three hundred pound bottles of wine on offer.

Things only went slightly awry when I ate the damned thing. The faggot had a terrific, coarse, crumbly texture and the celeriac purée was one of the nicest, silkiest ones I can remember. The kalette was a revelation – still firm, with a zip of mint that the dish badly needed. But the faggot was really heavy on the offal, to the point where it was a little too intense, a bit much even for me. I liked it at the time, and I finished it, but it sort of stayed with me for the rest of the day, in the way you don’t want.

Aileen had gone for my second choice from the menu, a beef and mushroom pie with a suet crust – or, for the purists among you, a stew with a lid. It came without accompaniments, so I was glad we’d also ordered chips and veg. It was placed on the table, and Aileen asked if it came with gravy (she is from Nottingham, after all). We were told, very nicely, that it did not.

At first, Aileen wasn’t sure about the whole affair but I think she warmed to it – the beef was all at the bottom but there was a fair amount of it, tender and breaking into strands. There was carrot and mushroom in there too, and she loved the green beans she’d ordered on the side, just-cooked and topped with crispy shallots. But even though this wasn’t a pie for sharing it was strange that it didn’t come with anything, including a plate to dish it up onto.

It reminded me very much of some of the great gastropub pies I’ve tried in the past, at Hackney’s The Marksman or The Magdalen Arms in Oxford, but it didn’t look quite as alluring as either of those. Still, it was eighteen pounds, one of which goes to Action Against Hunger, so you couldn’t really complain.

“That was lovely” said Aileen. “It needed gravy though.”

I’ve realised I didn’t get any pictures of the green beans or the chips. The chips were skin on (I thought that might be one Aileen’s list of restaurant no-nos, but apparently not) and clearly made in-house. And they were pleasant, but perhaps a little limp and unremarkable. I wanted that contrast of brittle crunch and fluff – and I didn’t care how many times they had to be cooked in order to achieve it – but these weren’t quite there. They were a decent vehicle for the last of my gravy, even so.

Our meal had been a little haphazardly timed – we didn’t get our bottle of wine almost until our mains turned up, so once they’d been eaten we had a lot of wine left. And service was brilliant at this point, leaving us in peace while we finished it and continued our epic conversation. I saw pictures of Aileen’s twins at their prom and wondered, as I’m sure she did, where the time had gone and how the little girls I’d first met all those years ago were suddenly sixteen.

Aileen in turn saw pictures of my wedding, and in between flicking through them and chatting about all sorts we caught up in the way that is such a tonic – a proper state of the nation natter encompassing work, family, friends, the past and the future. And I loved the Drapers Arms for this if for nothing else, for enabling this kind of afternoon.

Eventually, the wine was polished off and the dining room almost empty: I felt strangely proud of the fact that we’d outlasted all our fellow diners. So we got round to ordering dessert, along with a tea for Aileen and a bitter, middling latte for me. That section of the menu was very compact – a duo of cheeses and three desserts – and again, catered to people with different preferences to mine (I’ll eat most things, but I’ve never warmed to custard). So we both went for the lime posset and, like so much of what I’d eaten, it was nearly there.

As with my main course, almost everything was how you would want it to be. The strawberries on top were plump and sweet, the syrup they were in sticky and ambrosial. The shortbread was reassuringly irregular and crumbly: I saved mine to the very end. And the sharpness of lime in the posset worked so well, a welcome variation on a theme. But here’s the problem: the posset wasn’t properly set. Some of it was, but the rest was just liquid and hard to eat tidily, part dessert and part drink. So at the end of proceedings, you got a dish that was something like a synecdoche, a pretty good summary of the meal as a whole.

Our meal for two, including service charge, came to pretty much bang on one hundred and eighty pounds. And if that sounds like a lot, I’d say it could easily have been more. Our wine was distinctly entry level and we had, by accident rather than design, ordered the two cheapest mains on the menu. You could easily come away with a far more dented wallet than we did, although if you had an afternoon as terrific as the one I’d had you’d be fortunate indeed.

We wandered, full and happy, back to Angel tube station to go our separate ways. I could have talked for hours, but the idea of eating another mouthful or drinking another drop was more than either of us could contemplate (“I’m not sure I’ll even eat tomorrow” was Aileen’s verdict, although if she’s anything like me I’m sure she managed it). London looked beautiful in the autumn sun, and all around us Islington was gearing up for a busy Saturday night. We, on the other hand, were both dead set on being installed on our respective sofas by the time Strictly began.

When I think about the Drapers Arms, the thing I keep coming back to is that everything was good, and some of it was very good, but none of it was spot on. I imagine they have better days than they did the day I visited, I imagine there are nicer tables than the one we sat at, and iterations of that menu that would have suited me better. But I’ve had many far worse experiences, too, in countless places. So where does that leave you?

Yes, it was good but not perfect. And when it turns out like that you have to resort to your gut feel, try and weigh up all those almost intangible incidentals that define a meal. Because restaurant reviewers may not always tell you this – in fact many never talk about it at all – but there’s so much more to a meal than food, the room, or even service. I wish I’d liked everything a little more, and yet at the same time I know it will be hard to top as one of my favourite lunches of the year. So the Drapers Arms could have been better, but nonetheless I’m still really glad I went there. Happy that I ticked it off my list, and delighted that I chose it to host such a brilliant afternoon.

The Drapers Arms – 7.5
44 Barnsbury Street, London, N1 1ER
020 76190348

https://www.thedrapersarms.com

Restaurant review: Planque, Haggerston

On August 16, 2024December 15, 2025 By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

Our story this week starts with your narrator sitting outside an achingly hip café called Batch Baby in De Beauvoir Town, a part of London I’d never heard of, gulping down a latte before heading to a lunch reservation at Planque, an achingly hip restaurant in Haggerston, another part of London to which I had never been. It was a Saturday lunchtime, the sun was out – so were my legs, for that matter – and I felt very old and very fat, but mostly very old.

I had taken the Elizabeth Line to Liverpool Street and then hopped on a bus from Moorgate, wending its way past the horrendous roundabout at Old Street and out towards the North Circular, into the bits of London that are Vittles territory, rather than the province of broadsheet critics or restaurant bloggers. I had no idea what to expect of De Beauvoir Town but you couldn’t say it wasn’t interesting – handsome mansions one side of the road, stark and forbidding tower blocks on the other, presumably the legacy of a little light wartime bombing.

Those contrasts went further than the architecture. Up one side street, past a big red sign advertising The Sun, an establishment called the Happy Café offered a full English, and a “Sunday Roast Diner” (sic) with three veg, potatoes and gravy. Round the corner, Batch Baby was tasteful in an artfully yet carelessly thrown together sort of way, on the ground floor of a handsome building which apparently serves as a “community space and creativity hub”. The coffee was immaculate, and some of it was roasted by Sweven, the equally hip café in Bristol’s Bedminster. Do these places have a twinning scheme?

I sat outside, and I felt every year of my fifty years, and every stone of my no-I’m-not-telling-you-how-many stones. Everybody was thin and young and stylish and wearing dungarees and the sort of clothes you used to be able to buy in Shakti. And I remembered when they were first cool, back when I was at university, and then I realised that they were probably first cool in the seventies, before I was born, and that my parents probably looked at people wearing them in the nineties and felt how I felt in that moment, and that only served to make me feel older and wearier still.

Never mind. I loved the coffee, I took a picture, I applied my best filter, put it on Instagram, pretended I wasn’t fifty. And then I checked the time and scurried to the restaurant, just in time for my lunch reservation. On my way I passed a handsome old boozer, a cute Japanese canal by the towpath, a plant-based wine bar and bottle shop, a small plates restaurant with a sideline in sake. There was no denying it: I might not be in Dalston, but I was definitely Dalston-adjacent.

Planque is an exceptionally voguish spot which was recently listed as the 97th best restaurant in the U.K. by the National Restaurant Awards. I felt like I had seen it in dispatches everywhere and when my cousin Luke, who moved to London from Toronto a couple of years ago, suggested we should have lunch in town some time it turned out it was on both our lists. The chef was previously at P Franco, another legendary small plates and natural wine spot in Lower Clapton – another cool part of London to which I had never been – but Planque was meant, by all accounts, to be a step up even from that.

I’d seen reviews that had raved about the food, and others that had waxed lyrical about the interior. And to add to the exclusivity, although they allowed people like me to book tables in the restaurant there was also some kind of private members’ club element where you could cellar wine there, get discounted corkage rates and so on.

My swiftly grabbed photos of the room don’t do it justice but it is indeed a coolly attractive space. It’s built into two railway arches, but this has been lavished with funds and the interior, designed by a Danish studio, does have that very Scandi feel to it. Actually, it reminded me of many places I’ve eaten in on the continent, in Ghent or Copenhagen, but few in Blighty. But that also made me realise that in Europe, nobody would bat an eyelid about a dining room like this but here in England you can rely on people to lose their shit about it.

All that said, it was more a place to admire than necessarily enjoy eating in. The long communal table – again, something I feel like I’ve seen more in Europe than here – was very striking, and the wooden booths for four were attractive (although when Giles Coren reviewed Planque for the Times he complained about his arse going to sleep: now he knows how his dining companions must feel). But if you’re at a table for two, I think you do get a little diddled: those three tables were right at the start of the dining room, near the front door, close together and slightly unloved.

By this point Luke had arrived and we’d ordered a few aperitifs – a negroni for me and a Chartreuse and tonic for him. Luke is in his early thirties and lives in Clapton in an apartment which he assures me is slightly bigger than a studio. He runs multiple marathons a year, and his Instagram is a positive advert for being young and happy and living in London: if he isn’t jetting off to Australia or back to Canada, attending this wedding or that, running a marathon in one European capital or another he is in a beer garden or at a house party somewhere in London, surrounded by equally young and attractive people, living their halcyon days.

As if I didn’t feel old and fat enough already! Just once I’d like to see a picture of him heating up a depressing ready meal or watching Love Island, but it’s impossible to hold it against him. Too likable, you see.

At weekends Planque serves a set lunch only, which is yours for thirty-nine pounds and includes four small plates, your choice of main course and a set dessert. There are a few additional dishes in the bottom section, and with a little light questioning our server gave us a view on where in the meal they might turn up – so some would precede your small plates, some accompany your mains and a couple of cheeses which would come before your dessert (if you’re doing things right) or after it (if you’re not).

All pretty straightforward, but Luke and I couldn’t decide between the two mains. Steamed skate wing managed to combine one of my favourite ingredients with possibly the drabbest cooking technique there is, veal sweetbreads had undergone a similar experience by being turned into some kind of sausage and served with coco beans. Was Planque’s superpower taking the fun out of things? In the end, Luke said we should order both and share, which in most restaurants would be a perfectly viable option.

Wine first, though, and another reason to feel the exclusivity of Planque – and by exclusive I mean expensive. The cheapest wines at Planque are around sixty pounds, and the majority of the list comes in at three figures. My original choice was a Maccabeu from the Languedoc, but our server quickly and firmly told me it was very wild, and that I might well regret ordering it (why is it on the menu then? might be your question: I might have had that question in my mind too).

So instead he steered us towards a Corsican white which was a blend of Muscat, Vermentino and Bianco Gentile, an indigenous Corsican grape I’d never heard of. And, in fairness, it was a beautiful white wine. At eighty-four quid, you’d really want it to be. You can’t easily buy it elsewhere, which I guess is kind of the point, but what research I did manage to do suggested the mark-up was steep.

From this point onwards, though, concepts of value and its relationship to quality, and quantity, became foggier and harder to grasp. A good illustration was our opening dish – scallop tartelettes were divine, dimples of clean, pure, subtle high-grade scallop sheltering the crunch and sharpness of sea lettuce, like the tiniest gherkins. An exquisite couple of mouthfuls, one of the nicest amuses-bouches you could possibly imagine. Nine pounds, for the pair of them.

Then came the four small plates, pretty much at the same time as the tartelettes. I didn’t take a picture of the bread because I don’t think I’d clocked that it was one of the small plates in question. That felt a little cheeky, especially as it was literally the only ballast in the entire meal. Decent bread, gorgeous butter that spread at room temperature. Is that a course in its own right? Not convinced.

Far, far better was a little bowl of consommé, made with lardo and more scallop. If Planque had a gift for removing the fun, this was the most playful reversal of that. Consommé never looks like it’s going to be the most exciting thing you eat during a meal, but it can pack a massive punch that belies its unprepossessing appearance. That was definitely the case here, with that wonderful concentration of salt, sea and smoke. If there had been more of this kind of thing, I’d have been a happy man. I used some of the unremarkable bread to dab up the rest of the remarkable consommé.

The other two small plates also had that Nordic, beige feel to them. I guess using turbot is one way to make a roe dish seem luxe, but I wasn’t sure it delivered disproportionately well. Fish roe seems to be everywhere this year, and I’ve had something like this at Quality Chop House and 1 York Place. The former served it with salt and vinegar doughnuts, which were marvellous, and the latter with fennel, which was interesting.

Here instead you had mange tout which I believe the restaurant grows itself, crudités without the crudeness. It was okay, but I felt like it was trying to improve me. Many people have tried to do that over the years, always without success.

To me the very best of the small plates, and the single best thing I ate in my meal, was just described as lettuce, hazelnuts and Cora Linn. It was a salad, and when I say salad I mean two lettuce leaves scattered with hazelnuts, dressed and festooned with Cora Linn, which is apparently a Scottish take on Manchego. Again, if it sounded like it could be fun, Planque could make it plod. And if it sounded workaday, Planque could elevate it. I suppose that’s a skill of sorts, although not one I’m sure a restaurant should cultivate.

As you can probably tell, the small plates were small. But I was unconcerned, because our mains were on the way and I was counting on them to redeem matters. I was mistaken about that.

So first up, that veal sweetbread sausage. A single disc of it, with coco beans and some wilted greens draped on top. The sausage was, I do have to say, truly delicious – glossy, almost silky, rich stuff, and as far from mystery meat as you could hope to be. The beans were like many people I’ve worked with over the years – firm, nutty and a little boring. There was a meagre puddle of insipid jus. I dutifully bisected the sausage and doled out half of the coco beans onto a separate plate for my cousin, a properly joyless experience. Who wants to eat at a restaurant that literally turns you into a bean counter?

This was a small plate, not a main course, and it followed what had been billed as small plates but were in fact even smaller plates. I was getting a bad feeling about this.

Was the skate wing better? No, not really. When you get so little skate that you can obscure it with two cherry tomatoes, for my money you have a problem. As we ate this dish, after Luke had put precisely half of it on a side plate for me, I explained to him how much fun skate wing can be. How enjoyable it was to have a big fat skate wing in front of you, littered with capers, and to slowly ease the flesh off the cartilage.

Here, the restaurant had done that for you, it just so happened that they’d done it on a fraction of a skate wing, after steaming it – the optimum way of ensuring that something is technically cooked but hasn’t been introduced to anything that could enhance its flavour. Here the flavour enhancement came from three or four perfectly pleasant little tomatoes, two leaves and a lobster sauce which was thin and not exactly honking of crustacean. Was this really the ninety-seventh best restaurant in the country?

Feeling a tad peckish, we decided to interpose a cheese course between our small savoury plates and our no doubt small sweet plate. 24 month aged Comté was truly brilliant, with plenty of umami and grit to it. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and perhaps my expectations had been brutally crushed by this point but I didn’t even think it represented relatively poor value at nine pounds.

“Would you like some bread with that?” asked our server and, desperate for carbs, we said yes. Two more slices, four more quid.

Last of all, our dessert. If dessert isn’t fun a restaurant might as well give up and go home, and gladly Planque did rise to the occasion right at the end. The menu just called it sheep’s curd, plum and raspberry which doesn’t do justice to one of the best dishes of the day – a fantastic, well orchestrated collection of flavours that came together beautifully. The raspberry, lurking within, was the sharp surprise that brought it all together. I was frustrated, because this showed that the restaurant could do crowd-pleasing: it felt like they chose not to.

We decided that having a coffee or a digestif would be throwing good money after bad so, about an hour and a half after we first sat down, we got our bill. It came to two hundred and seven pounds, not including tip, and it’s to Planque’s credit that they don’t sneak in a twelve and a half per cent service charge but let you decide all that for yourself. And service, I should add, was very good – hushed but quietly authoritative, and I was very glad that our server saved us from what sounded like an exceptionally challenging wine.

But here’s the thing – even though the service was good, I didn’t get any warmth. And ironically that was absolutely in keeping with everything else. Planque felt like a cerebral restaurant, rather than somewhere to love, and when London has so many restaurants out there I do wonder who would go to Planque, decide it was absolutely their cup of tea and become a regular. Very thin people, I suppose.

I enjoyed some of what I ate, very much, but I couldn’t help feeling, at multiple times during my meal, where’s the rest? And that reinforced in my mind the vague presentiment that Planque was a restaurant to see and be seen in, more than it was a place in which to drink and be fed. So on that cerebral level I know that the kitchen can cook, I know the wines are good and I know the space they’ve created is very well executed. But I feel like they have missed something about hospitality, because all of that – even all of that – is just not enough.

When you leave a good restaurant, you should feel lots of things. You should feel like you’ve been privileged to have someone cooking for you, you should feel looked after. You should feel a rosy glow, and know that you’ve banked a happy memory. You should feel like telling people about it, and ideally you should feel like going back. This next bit might mark me out as not just old, not just fat, but also a bit of a Philistine, but here goes. Leaving a good restaurant should make you feel so many things. But you shouldn’t leave it, I’m sorry to say, feeling like you could murder a KitKat Chunky.

Planque – 6.6
322-324 Acton Mews, London, E8 4EA
020 72543414

https://planque.co.uk

Restaurant review: Kolae, Borough

On June 21, 2024June 21, 2024 By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

How many of the U.K.’s 100 best restaurants have you been to? I ask because it’s a thing – the National Restaurant Awards – and it came out last week.

Looking through the list, I couldn’t help but feel I was letting the side down as a restaurant reviewer: my score was a measly 7. Some of them, like Manteca, ranked among the best meals I’ve eaten in the course of writing this blog. But there were at least a couple in that list where I thought “really?” I was pleased to see Wilsons make the list but COR, which didn’t feature, is definitely better than at least a couple of the top 100 that I’ve been to. Still, as I’ve said in the past, the delight of reading a list like this largely lies in disagreeing with it.

Anyway, as it happens my total only ticked up to 7 because I happened to visit Kolae, a regional Thai restaurant in Borough, the week before the awards were announced. It was ranked 27th, significantly higher than any of the other places I’ve been to, which is an impressive achievement given that it opened late last year. It’s the second restaurant from the team behind Shoreditch’s Som Saa and has very quickly surpassed it in terms of profile (it probably helps that, unlike Som Saa, it doesn’t have any problematic racist incidents in its history).

What this means is that a significant number of restaurant critics have reviewed the place already: Giles Coren for the Times, Tom Parker Bowles for the Mail On Sunday, Tim Hayward for the FT, Jimi Famurewa for the Evening Standard, and Lilly Subbotin for the Independent. Even a couple of restaurant bloggers have already got in on the act, so I can honestly say I’ve rarely, if ever, read as much about a restaurant before stepping through its front door as I had with Kolae.

And the acclaim was consistent, full-throated, verging on the hyperbolic. I mean, get a load of this: Famurewa said it was a “scintillating shot in the arm”, Parker Bowles that it made “the tastebuds tumescent and the gut giddy”. Hayward, the thinking person’s least favourite broadsheet reviewer, settled for the overblown “This has just reminded me why I eat”.

It wasn’t all like that – Giles Coren spent a large part of his review name-dropping Important People He Knew, as did one distinctly regional restaurant blogger – but the important thing was that there wasn’t a single word of dissent: Kolae, according to the consensus, was magnificent.

So it had been on my radar for a while, and an afternoon off in London ahead of a gig that evening – the exceptional Jessica Pratt at Islington’s Union Chapel – gave me a chance to check it out with Zoë. It’s literally just round the corner from Borough Market, a few doors down from Monmouth Coffee, and a pre-lunchtime stroll round the market made it clear just how much competition there was for Kolae to stand out amongst: not just from traders, but nearby restaurants like Barrafina, Berenjak and Bao.

It’s a handsome site, across three storeys, which apparently used to be a coach house in a previous life. I didn’t see the first or second floors, but the ground floor was lovely, all muted concrete and exposed brick. Everything was nicely proportioned: the tables were generously sized and well spaced, and even the bar stools followed suit, being even better padded than I am. So different from, for example, sitting cheek by jowl at Manteca. The Independent summed it up thus: “there’s no other way to say it, Kolae is cool”.

We arrived for a late lunch but even then the room was full of happy-looking diners. No outside space that I saw, really, but the exterior was quite fetching, to the extent where when we left a couple of people were taking pictures sitting in front of the restaurant and uploading them to the ‘gram. “But they haven’t even eaten here!” was Zoë’s baffled assessment.

The menu, on paper at least, looks like it can’t decide whether it’s a starters and mains or small plates restaurant. All the reviews I’ve read say it’s the latter, but the menu lists three things as “smaller” and the rest as “larger” and our server said we should probably plan on three of the larger plates between two. But it’s sort of structured as starters, mains and sides and so we approached it that way. I would say everything seemed reasonably priced, too, with the smaller plates costing about six pounds and the larger ones going from ten to eighteen.

But really, a lot was fluid: at least some of the larger plates felt more like starters or sides, and at least one of the sides, which we ended up ordering, was far more like a main in its own right. Perhaps all the dishes simply identified as food – if so, all power to them. We took it as an excuse to order pretty much everything we wanted and to risk being full. From what I’ve seen, many people who have reviewed Kolae have taken exactly that approach.

Now, before I tell you about everything we ate, I do have to mention heat. Because another thing my research indicated, time and again, was that the food at Kolae might be hotter than you’re used to. A few reviews don’t really talk about it – presumably because those people are hard as nails. But most go to town on it – in no particular order, the food apparently “jolts the senses like being woken at 4am by a sadistic drill instructor”, “blew my bloody head off”, is “blisteringly hot” or leaves you “teetering between burning pain and pure, unfiltered pleasure”.

Does that sound like fun to you? I have to say it didn’t really to me, so I did ask the server which dishes to absolutely steer clear of. There were about three of them. Everything we had was fine, so you won’t get any sub-Fifty Shades Of Grey hogwash in this review.

The first thing we ate was that first step outside the comfort zone. Fried prawn heads with turmeric and garlic were one of those things where you just have to suspend disbelief and give them a go, so we did. Zoë was reluctant approaching the first one but they were crunchy and distinctly moreish and that meant I didn’t have to polish off the rest on my own. I’m not sure how something from the sea could taste quite so earthy, but these did: I can honestly say that I’ve never enjoyed eating brains so much before, and almost certainly never will again. And yes, prawns do have brains. I know, because I Googled it.

Even better were biryani rice crackers, huge slabs of tactile delight with more than a trickle of nam jim, one of those dipping sauces which just has, and effortlessly combines, everything: sweetness, citrus and funky, salty fish sauce, infinitely more than the sum of its parts. This, for me, was the first of many moments at Kolae where I just thought: this isn’t quite like anything I’ve eaten before. Some of that is my own fault for my sheltered gastronomic life, but if anything that made me appreciate how high definition this food was.

The next few dishes, a mixture of small plates, large plates and specials, were variations on a theme and all linked with the name of the restaurant. Kolae is apparently a southern Thai technique which, as far as I can gather, involves marinating in coconut milk and spice, grilling over fire, re-marinating and re-grilling until what you get is glorious, deep and sticky.

The small plate displaying this technique was a couple of skewers with plump – or, if you get your kicks this way, “tumescent” – mussels threaded on them. I liked them, but perhaps having read so much hype about them I expected these eight mussels to be even more magnificent than they were. Worth it, perhaps, just for the novelty of seeing mussels served in such a different, faff-free way.

It was much, much more successfully deployed with chicken – in this case a huge, deboned chicken thigh which came on a skewer which surely could barely have carried its weight. This is where the technique was really at its best, the meat permeated with complexity and delight.

This kind of food makes fools of us reviewers because it exposes our narrow horizons and our limited vocabulary – I’ve seen it compared to yakitori, to laksa, to satay and to massaman. Better to be honest and say you can’t really sum up the smoke, sweetness, spice and comfort and just say that you should maybe order it so one day, you can compare other great dishes to it instead.

The third of our trilogy of skewers was bavette, topped with crispy onions. You get the idea by now, and although I enjoyed it, three different permutations of that concept was probably one too many. It was better value than the mussels, but not quite as good as the chicken.

At this point, the only question in my mind was where in the pantheon of greats Kolae would wind up nestling. The space was fantastic, the food had been eye-opening – just enough challenge, just enough fascination – and it was simply a wonderful place to be on a weekday afternoon. Every now and again flames leapt from a wok in the open kitchen, there was still hubbub even after the lunch rush had passed, and more was to come.

But that’s where things wobbled, if only slightly. Service had been wonderful, and when you got the attention of a server they couldn’t have been more helpful, but it proved increasingly difficult to flag them down. We’d finished a really gorgeous hazy IPA, Juicy Chug, by small London brewery Jiddler’s Tipple, which had gone beautifully with the small plates, but were keen to get some wine.

And we got there eventually, but if the staff had been more on it I daresay we would have drunk more. It’s a decent and interesting wine list, although the vast majority of the options by the glass were north of a tenner. I really loved my choice, a Greek malagousia and assyrtiko blend, but I think Zoë might have shaded it with her New Zealand riesling.

The first of the large plates that came out again demonstrated that this was a fluid menu where things overlapped and echoed other dishes. I’m not saying that the kale fritters were a replica of the biryani rice crackers from earlier in the meal, but they were definitely close siblings, both in terms of the crunch and complexity. This sauce was very different from the nam jim, but I got sweetness and chilli but maybe not the fermentation the menu suggested would be there. It was however another tactile triumph, although I’m not sure it really felt like a side. Perhaps I should have tried the sour mango salad with dried fish, but everything I’d read suggested that eating it would be a fast train to meltdown..

One of the absolute standout dishes of the meal was – surprise surprise – Zoë’s choice. Soy braised pork belly and ribs was outstanding, in a sauce that was far more about the tightrope between sweetness and saltiness, with heat, just this once, taken out of the equation. The sauce was just gorgeous, the meat was that perfect combination of caramelised and yielding, and it was if anything another dish I hadn’t expected – more poise than bombast, in a meal that had mostly been about very forceful flavours.

And this was where the wobble came in again. We’d ordered this and a second main, a prawn and stone bass curry, and we’d asked for a couple of bowls of rice to accompany them. Our server told us that one bowl of rice would easily be enough for both dishes, and that we could always order more if we wanted to. And maybe that might have been true, but it was very hard to judge when we were waiting something like ten minutes for that second dish to come out.

And this is the drawback of small plates and large plates, starters and mains: because, rightly or wrongly, we had ordered a main each and what this meant in practice was that I sat there like a lemon wondering if they’d forgotten my order. By the time it came out, most of the rice was gone. We ordered another one to go with the fish curry, but didn’t end up using most of it.

I waited so long for my main that I didn’t even get a photo of it, which would frustrate me more if it had been more exciting. It was okay but not extraordinary, and I wonder if the staff have had to manage expectations about the heat levels in the menu following some of those hype-laden reviews, because they told me that this dish was on the hot side and reality it was more restrained than I’d expected.

It was possibly the only thing I ate, up to that point, that tasted unspecial: was that because I’d had to wait so long for it, or just because it didn’t quite match the standard elsewhere? Who knows. All the other reviewers seem to have thought it was out of this world.

Kolae’s menu only had two desserts on it, so naturally we ordered both: how could you resist the possibility that you might just eat the twenty-seventh best dessert in the country? Especially as there was a Coteaux du Layon on the menu, a dessert wine I can never see without ordering which always punches above the likes of a Sauternes (or even a Tokaji, for my money).

Zoë had the worst of it, with a dessert which left her baffled and ambivalent. Mango custard with sweet sticky rice and fresh coconut sounds great, doesn’t it? But the reality was a little odd and neither one thing nor the other. The custard was pleasant enough, if not exactly singing with mango, but the layer of lukewarm rice – more claggy than sticky – left her a little cold. Looking at the reviews I’ve seen, Kolae only did one dessert for some time, and all their desserts have been kind-of permutations of what Zoë had (well, left some of) and what I ordered.

That suggests they might still be searching for the right dishes to end meals at the restaurant. On this evidence, perhaps they should keep looking.

I had the smaller, cheaper and better dessert, and arguably the more conventional one. A single sphere of coconut sorbet, gorgeously smooth, came crowned with a salted tea caramel, peanuts on the side. And again, it felt like a few good ideas in search of better execution: I liked the sorbet, I absolutely loved the caramel, I wanted the ratio of the two to be different. And just dumping peanuts next to it felt like an afterthought, when I’d have liked the whole thing to feel integrated.

As I said, previous reviews I’ve seen suggested that Kolae previously only offered one dessert which combined elements of these two. That process of evolution doesn’t feel like it’s concluded yet.

Still, we were full and happy with much to digest. At this point getting attention was a breeze, and our meal – a lot of food, three drinks apiece and a 12.5% service charge lobbed on – came to a hundred and sixty four pounds. I’ve seen a few reviews say that you could spend less, which you could, but I for one didn’t want to come away from the meal thinking anything along the lines of ‘I wonder what those chicken skewers would have tasted like?’

Hours later, after a hectic traipse round Selfridges and Liberty unsuccessfully trying to identify birthday presents, we sat in the very nice beer garden of a pub in Islington, drank two deeply expensive pints of Steady Rolling Man and talked about our meal. It’s always one of my favourite things about going on duty with Zoë, the post mortem, and few things accompany one as well as sunshine and an al fresco pint of Steady Rolling Man.

Our conclusions were fairly similar – that Kolae was extraordinary, and that we were glad we’d taken a punt on it. That the room was incredible, the location was brilliant and that there were many dishes on there the likes of which neither of us had ever had. If the overwhelming critical reaction did have a feel of mass hysteria about it, it didn’t detract from the fact that it was an excellent restaurant.

And yet, there were a few things that just stopped it from being truly great. The slightly disconnected service, for one, and the homogeneity of some of the menu. And the timing issues with the mains did really bug me: I get that when you bill things as large plates and say people might want to share them you may not guarantee they will all come out seconds apart, but a ten minute lag felt like a gaffe and really did take the sheen off what had otherwise been an excellent meal.

And then there were the desserts, the most underwhelming element of the whole thing. I don’t hold with all the tourists wafting round Borough Market with their naff standard issue strawberries swamped in chocolate, but I seem to remember a stall in the market offering raw milk ice cream. If I’d known what Kolae’s desserts would be like, I’d have gone there instead.

But these are, in the scheme of things, relatively minor quibbles. If you have a list of London restaurants you plan to get round to, and Kolae isn’t on it, I’d definitely recommend adding it. If you have any curiosity about this kind of food and this region, even if like me you might lack the experience or the vocabulary to express it, it’s well worth expanding your consciousness with a visit.

And if you’re slightly worried either by suggestions of apocalyptic chilli heat or the visceral horrors of munching on a plate of prawn heads, don’t worry: the former probably won’t materialise, and the latter isn’t mandatory. That’s just the hype talking – the hype that sells papers, results in reservations and gets a very good restaurant an elevated status as the twenty-seventh best restaurant in the country, less than a year after it opened.

Is it the twenty-seventh best restaurant in the country? I’m not sure about that. I’ve wondered, since eating there, whether it would make my top thirty meals of all time: it’s one of the highest ratings I’ve given out on this blog, but top thirty full stop? Maybe not. But the best is the enemy of the good – and whether or not Kolae is the best, the fact remains that it really is very good indeed. Just leave as many preconceptions as you can at home, and enjoy the ride.

Kolae – 8.7
6 Park Street, London, SE1 9AB

https://kolae.com