St Leonards, 70 Leonard Street, London EC2 (020 7739 1291). Meal for two including drinks and service £75-£120.
There is a thin line between “That’s genius” and “What in God’s name were they thinking?” At St Leonards, a new restaurant from chefs Jackson Boxer and Andrew Clarke of Brunswick House in Vauxhall, they walk both sides of that line. If what you want from a restaurant is food as a centrepiece to your conversation which will entice you to thumb the picture button on your smartphone repeatedly so you’ve got something to show your dreadful friends, St Leonards is for you. If what you want is a relaxing dinner, over unchallenging food – if, say, you’re the kind of person who thinks tuna bone caramel is a prog rock band from Sunderland circa 1975, rather than a viable menu option – please stay away. This restaurant will not make you happy.
St Leonards, named after its address, occupies the Shoreditch site of what was Eyre Brothers, one of the first ambitious places to open here back in 2001. It’s fitting therefore that it should be replaced by somewhere so cutting edge you could slice your arm off on it. The makeover has used every material known to humankind as long as that material is polished concrete. There are hessian banquettes in a character-forming shade of ochre, sturdy wooden chairs and, at the back, a magnificent wood-burning hearth accessorised with bespoke ironmongery and hung with animal parts, as if modern, industrial society has collapsed and we have fallen back on the old ways.
If anyone finally opens a Game of Thrones theme park, this could be its high-end restaurant, though Clarke, with his blond House of Stark-style plaited beard and his tattooed arms like the Bayeux tapestry with a pulse, would have to be a part of the deal. Boxer, a nerdy, clean-cut Lannister, works the next, metal-riveted, steampunk-style station along, plating up the raw and the cured.
At Brunswick House, they pursued the best simple thing they could do with the greatest of ingredients. It was all about big, muscular vegetable dishes and salads and long-roasted meats. Here, they obsessively investigate the possibilities of those ingredients. From the short list headed “shellfish” comes an oyster dressed with finely diced pickled greens and another that has been flamed then buried under a drift of crisp-fried breadcrumbs enriched with lardo, the cured back fat of the pig. Because pig helps most things along, even oysters.
A scallop the size of a tangerine is sliced up sashimi-style then reassembled and dressed with pickled samphire, elderflower and a lightly acidic broth, dotted with ravishing pools of herb oil. It’s like a pointillist has been at work on your dinner. It is swoon-worthy and so we swoon.
It was a swoon too soon, because now comes a sturdy piece of rugged porcelain containing a cool, dark broth, full of smokey acidity which recalls tosazu, the Japanese dashi vinegar. It surrounds an inch-thick square fillet of raw bass, overlaid by thin triangular slices of skin-on kohlrabi, laid one across the other like the scales of the fish. It looks fabulous. Get the right proportions of ingredients on your fork and it tastes fabulous too: subtle raw bass, the crunch of kohlrabi, a broth that jump-starts the saliva glands. The problem is the fish comes as four huge lumps. Each one would make your cat think Christmas had come early. It needed to have been sliced up and reassembled, like the scallop. You’re left wondering if they simply forgot to finish what they were doing, and questioning the £12.60 price tag. Here, “challenging” is a synonym for “I want to like you but I can’t.”
From Clarke and his leaping flames comes a plate of blackened onions, dusted thickly with fiery ground red pepper, and laid in that tuna bone caramel. It’s formed by doing something complicated with tuna bones, sugar and stock until it forms a sweet, sticky fish sauce that has us ordering bread to chase dribbles about the plate. This is not a dish for chatting over. It is a dish for talking about. It’s bold and serious; it’s what ambitious onions want to be later in their career. Some will hate it. The prosaically named vegetable plate is the most Brunswick House of the dishes: it’s whatever’s good at the moment, grilled and dressed with salsa verde and glugs of peppery olive oil. Tonight, it is nutty borlotti beans, slippery sheaths of skinned red pepper, artichoke hearts, more onions and the like. It’s the good stuff given due care and attention.
Meat has its moment on the menu, but only a short one. There are just two beef dishes, a massive sirloin for sharing at £85 and a much smaller bavette for £18, served in deep, pink slices with curls of cured bone marrow grated over the top, which makes it stridently meatier than it already is. It is beefiness fiercely amplified. Generally, though, meat turns up as a flavouring. It’s there in a side of purple sprouting broccoli with shreds of ham hock, smoked chilli; or, best of all, with half a hispi cabbage, dipped in molten pork fat then blackened on the grill. It’s topped with spoonfuls of pig fat-enriched breadcrumbs. It’s a 97% non-meat dish that laughs hysterically in the face of non-meat eaters.
Dessert is conventional by comparison. There’s a beautifully made salted caramel tart in a crisp pastry shell, cut to an acute point, with a perfectly balanced cardamom ice cream. The baba of their rum baba is a little dense but gets points for being properly infused with rum. Pieces of smoked pineapple alongside leave my companion wondering if something has been burned.
And that one question sums up St Leonards. Certain dishes leave you wondering if that was what they intended. At one point, knowing my tastes, Clarke passed me a plate of thick-cut, long-simmered pork jowl, with a massive ribbon of ivory fat at its back. It is destined for the next day’s menu and I ask if he’s “gone insane”. Filthy expletives may have been involved. I adore fatty pig more than most, but this is to get armpit-deep in the stuff.
Dinner at St Leonards, lubricated by well-priced, classic French wines, is not so much a meal out as a funfair ride. Many people will be completely thrilled. And some may come off mouthing, “Never again.”
News bites
Ox Club, just off the Headrow in Leeds, describes itself as a “contemporary solid fuel grill restaurant”. Food is intense and they’ve rarely met an ingredient they couldn’t char, or hit with controlled burning. From the wood grill go for aged lamb with black garlic ketchup and dandelion, cod cheeks with smoked butter or grilled hispi cabbage with a ‘hot sauce crumb’ (oxclub.co.uk).
Manchester’s Festa Italiana returns to the city’s cathedral gardens for the second year from 13 to 15 July. There will be an on-site Italian producers’ market, a variety of street food options – think hot and hot running pizza – and a live cookery theatre, featuring a bunch of chefs flying over from Italy for the weekend, plus banquets (festaitalianauk.com).
Chef Dan Doherty of Duck and Waffle, familiar as a judge on BBC TV’s Britain’s Best Home Cook, has bought the Royal Oak pub in Marylebone, London. He says pubs are “anchors in a community” and is determined to bring the old boozer back to life.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
