Winkles, 238 Roman Road, Globe Town, London E2 (020 8880 7450). Meal for two, including wine and service, £40-£70
Just across from Winkles, a seafood restaurant in London's East End, is a road sign. It announces that you are half a mile from Bow and half a mile from Mile End. I can offer no better description of the location, save to add that it is also half a mile from Bethnal Green tube. The good people of Globe Town, the London district which Winkles calls home, will not thank me for this, but it really does feel as if Winkles is half a mile from anywhere. It is a very odd place to find a restaurant of such intent.
Of course, seafood does have a noble place within the gastronomic culture of the East End, though I use that term loosely. Winkles, whelks and cockles can be OK, but the jellied eel is a disgusting aberration, which only qualifies as food because eating it will not immediately kill you.
This eel thing is my prejudice, of course, and one that Winkles does not share. At the heart of the operation, which looks like a room set bought wholesale from Ikea - wipe-down tiling, wipe-down tables, polite, tidy, wipe-down staff - is a cold counter stacked full of fresh seafood. And there, taking pride of place, are those winkles and whelks and cockles and - please protect my heaving stomach - those jellied eels.
There is, thankfully, so much more besides: oysters and lobster, tiger prawns and huge scallops and whole crabs. Punters can treat this as a shop or, better still, choose lunch from here. Either way, the prices, which should never be too low in a fish restaurant, are sensible: £5 for a starter of king prawns, £1.25 each for oysters, £8.25 for a dressed crab. The way they are served is equally restrained. We ordered three langoustine for starters - fine, juicy specimens - and they came with a rather good Marie Rose sauce.
The cooking, from the main menu, makes up for that simplicity with an ambition that is both realised and not. Large seared scallops, complete with their coral, came with a rich cream sauce that smelt pleasingly of vanilla, though tasted little of it. On its own the sauce made the eyes water; against the sweetness of the scallops it worked very well. A salmon fish cake, a huge chunky pile of a thing, was almost all shredded fish and no filler, and came with a pokey hollandaise sauce.
For my main course I chose a special, of spicy crab linguine, which was far too much pasta and not enough crab or fishiness. Honour was saved by eight shellon tiger prawns grilled with ginger and chilli, which was the kind of thing finger bowls were invented for. Desserts are of the bovverbooted, bread and butter pudding type. We shared a slice of cheesecake, which came with a frozen centre that stood witness to its manufacture somewhere off premises. It was a disappointing end to a meal that had got so much else so very right.
