Maybe you, like me, keep eyeing the Michelin-starred Restaurant St Barts tasting-menu longingly, or bumping it up on that never ending restaurants-to-visit-when-I-win-the-lottery note on your phone. For those unable or hesitant to pay £130 per head, executive chef Brendan Appleby (formerly of Lyles, Inver, and Hackney Wick's Silo) and head chef Kirsty Easterbrook (previously sous chef at RSB) have a concept they hope you'll love. I certainly did, but it is aimed at my demographic: foodie, fussy yet sustainably anxious cosmopolitans with a predilection for gothic interiors. Sound familiar? Brilliant!
Horseshoeing appropriately around a descending staircase, it's a designer's idea of what the 16th century London watering hole would look like. Dark wainscoting, hanging herbs near the toilet, a large slab of even darker volcanic rock bar capping an open kitchen, with cosy white candle-licked rooms around that sharp curve. Hanging globes and careful lighting promise you won't be squinting at your menu in the firelight, and you'll look banging in the Instagram pics you force your long-suffering partner to take.
Onwards to higher things. Tavern, despite cosplaying as a salt-of-the-earth alehouse, has very much carried the ethos of St Barts over to this site next to Shoreditch Town Hall. Especially a certain dysmorphic view of quantities. A 'chunion' puff, quickly becoming a staple of both, is described by our effervescent waitress as 'giant'. Heavenly, light as air, transformative - all applicable - but the mouthful of onion gougère and molten cheese is certainly not giant.
Fleetingly they are gone, ostrich-feather cheese strands and all. A Carlingford oyster is thankfully more on the gigantic side, creamy with mignonette and dabs of oil. Pig skins, a play on pork scratchings, is utterly whimsical - tentacles of crusted squealer, long as witches' fingers to manoeuvre into your fishy (smoked cod's roe) butter and crunch amidst chortles.
Fire bread like a shorn hedgehog, more a calzone with a miso house butter and small triangular spines of capers on top, but warm, wild garlic and tomatoes inside - a flattened ball of stodge much welcomed alongside all the flotsam and jetsam.
The fantasticality doesn't stop there, thankfully! Merit Mushrooms from a north London-based supplier is a dish that would have passed us by if it weren't for our passionate server. Yes, with help, we stumbled across a showstopper. On paper I fear it may not live up well - maitake/hen of the woods (you know the ones all the TikTokers are currently frantically foraging) sits like some carcass of tangled octopus.
Morels and chanterelles slump over the large lump, with a yeast and barley risotto-type thing sitting in a foamy yellow sauce below. Meaty yet not, flavourful yet light, proving that the mycorrhizal world is filled with mystery! Single baked Isle of Skye scallops come out on a bed of dried seaweed and cobnut XO crumbs like a salt attack, and the British focus means native beef sirloin for two to share, asparagus with brown butter, or turbot and cockles if you're feeling a little Molly Malone. Ranging from £12 to £84 for mains, you could possibly sample without bankruptcy. We are recommended about ten dishes total, and that genuinely does stuff us.
Amidst all the delight there are some deferments. Cocktail-wise it's whimsy over flavour, with a glowing carrot gimlet feeling a little All Bar One, and the beef fat old fashioned greasy in a way it didn't really need to be. Salt is liberally leaned on throughout, so be aware, and at points visuals trump practicality. A £25 quail from Mallard Moat (an East Suffolk family business) arrives in a splendid orange sunset tandoori sauce, but is piddly wings instead of the whole bird, and even when diving in with fingers (as instructed) the effort overwhelms the payoff. Saddleback pork loin has pointless but pretty cucumber strewn over it (and a delightful black apple sauce). A cuttlefish and pork sausage (40/70 respectively, we are assured) promises countercultural oddness, yet the clumps of cephalopod don't quite meld with the flesh of the mammal.
But this is Appleby & Easterbrook's chance to experiment, to upsize and wow in a more attainable setting, and overall they absolutely do. Elderflower ice cream, clumps of strawberry - a bite of pure summer! A brown butter cake, a blondie of such piquant and petulant dimensions and flavour it takes all your willpower not to wolf. This reinvention of the British staple, if not a whole era, is an idiosyncratic orgy of ethical supply chain and out-of-the-box gastronomy. Use it as a taster for the leap up to St Barts or simply come in for those luscious pig-skin wands served in a tankard - at £8 they are a cheaply bought chuckle in a wantonly chuckle-less world.
Tavern
374-378 Old Street
London
EC1V 9LT
