There’s a category of restaurant that seems to be emerging… fine dining, formal technique, served à la carte, in a spot that feels like your local.
I wrote about Maré a few weeks ago. The latest restaurant to fit this category is Tavern, from the team behind Restaurant St. BARTS, which holds both a Michelin star and a Green Star. It takes over the old Nest site on Old Street, which was by the same group but Nest was a more formal dining experience. The team reopened the room as Tavern, somewhere that feels like a neighbourhood spot.
From Fulham, Old Street is a decision and not somewhere I go to often. But I was meeting my friend Gaby, who works in east London, which felt like a great reason to make the trip east.
East London is such a trek to get to which always leaves me with the inevitable question after the meal finishes, was it worth it?
Tavern is a room that reads as high-end medieval tavern, and somehow pulls it off.
We start with the chunion, the dish that’s been dominating my feed for weeks, and the fire bread with house miso butter. The chunion is fine. That’s the problem: fine is not what you expect from a dish working so hard on Instagram, and on its own it wouldn’t justify the trip from Fulham.
The fire bread should have been my kind of thing, I tend to love anything with miso or butter in the name, so the two together had the makings of everything I want in a bread course. Instead it arrived without leaving a mark: the bread was a touch dry, and I’d forgotten we’d even ordered it until I found it in my photos from the evening.
The evening changes trajectory with the scallop. Isle of Skye, dressed in cobnut XO: juicy, sweet, the sweetness balanced by the umami of the sauce. It’s the first thing all night that tastes like the kitchen I was promised.
The Hereford sirloin with peppercorn sauce, and a side of chips and salad, this keeps the pattern going, just not the one you’d expect. The steak is good. But the sauce is better. Which is the wrong way round: on a plate built around a piece of beef, the beef should lead. Instead the chips become delivery vehicles for the peppercorn sauce.
Then the dessert reorders everything. The sunflower seed brown butter cakes arrive looking like nothing, just small, plain, easy to underestimate, without a doubt the best dessert I’ve eaten all year. The flavour is disproportionate to the size; the texture is faultless. I loved it enough to order an extra to take home for James.
So: worth the crossing? Not for the chunion, regardless of what Instagram tells you. The verdict lands where I least expected it, on a plain little cake only slightly bigger than a petit four, the one dish nobody’s photographing.
At Tavern, the support keeps outperforming the lead… the sauce beats the steak and the humble dessert beats everything else. It’s a strange way to experience a restaurant. It’s also, it turns out, a reason I’d make the journey west to east again.
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Interesting, I’ve walked by this place a number of times and have always been intrigued by the moody looking exterior, yet surprising white crispness and lightness of what’s inside
I’m not a small plates person generally, but I do love a petit dessert
Funny how the dishes nobody is talking about are often the ones that end up defining a meal. The sunflower seed brown butter cakes sound like a perfect example of that.