434 Kingsland Road, London E8 (020 7249 9081). Meal for two, including drinks and service, £100
Rotorino is Stevie Parle’s difficult second album. It’s the moment when the beguiling thrust and parry of brilliant young talent is called upon to prove itself. In effect this means that in opening this, his second restaurant, he is competing with himself or, to be more exact, competing with the garlands and laurels thrust upon him by the media – including this newspaper. We named him young chef of the year back in 2010. Having given him an award he didn’t seek, I am now asking him to live up to it. Which he doesn’t, not quite. That’s bloody unfair, though not unreasonable: Rotorino is being marketed on Parle’s name.
First, the story so far. Birmingham-born Parle is the son of a greedy doctor. The father loved to eat and introduced his boy to the joys of eating, too, as a good father should. It was a short step from there to cooking, first dinner parties for his parents’ friends, later on a course at Ballymaloe in Ireland, where he got his culinary education. Asked by the marvellous Darina Allen where he would like to cook now he had graduated, Parle said the River Café. A phone call later and he was there, aged just 16. He stayed for three years. There were stints at Moro and with Skye Gyngell at Petersham Nurseries. As he said to me when he won the young chef award, what defined the food at all these places was that it was an extension of the domestic; it was not about the cheffy and elaborate. It was about home. Nothing was foamed or smeared.
After a few supper clubs, Parle landed at the glass and steel showroom of furniture designer Tom Dixon in London’s Ladbroke Grove, for a residency called the Dock Kitchen. It was meant to last a few months, but has become permanent. That was his break-out first album. You came out humming the main courses. His menus there were restless. “I don’t do fusions within dishes,” he once said to me. “But the menu may roam a little.” So a crisp, deep-fried quail with an Asiatic fish-sauce dip could sit alongside a decidedly Indian mix of beetroot and curry leaves, which in turn could give way to a thoroughly Mediterranean fish stew with the woozy kick of fennel.
He is an inveterate traveller who likes to learn his food in situ, and at the Dock Kitchen it showed. As Sam Clark of Moro has said: “Stevie has this way of seeing past a recipe and getting to the core of a dish. He gets under the skin of a culture.” It was pure talent, casually worn. Not for him the bravado and cock-waving of the chef world. Parle is a thoroughly nice, mild-mannered chap, with a fringe perfectly designed for peering coyly out from under.
Not that there’s much space for that sort of thing at Rotorino. It’s a bruiser of a restaurant, located so far north up the Kingsland Road my ears pop. You have to pass through the layers of first Vietnamese and then Turkish cafés, the cultural substrata, to get there. It’s a partnership with the cocktail bar operator Jonathan Downey, and has about it some of his signature hard-edged Brooklyn chic. Some walls are scraped back to the bare, knackered brick, then picked out with pools of light from wall-mounted spots as if dereliction is a virtue. The back wall is hard, 70s blue-patterned tiles. There are booths, and a ceiling in various media. It’s that casual, thrown-together look which takes careful thought and connivance. It’s expensive chaos.
The Brooklyn edge is reflected in the menu, which is sooty, urban Italian. It’s as if Parle has done with travelling and settled down, close to his River Café roots. Or not quite, for though it reads nicely it doesn’t eat perfectly. The complicated lists and headings offer many things in small or large plates so you are left baffled as to how much should be ordered, and inevitably with a bill that quietly mounts. A frito misto of fresh anchovies, squid, courgettes and an ill-advised bit of deep-fried lemon is just too greasy and heavy and cloying. Getting this sort of deep-fat frying right is knife-edge stuff; here it’s unbalanced and blunt.
Pig’s head croquettes are too much underseasoned jelly, not enough meat and way too much casing. These have been egged and floured as if in preparation to be used as projectiles. We take refuge in a pleasant watermelon and tomato salad with a hit of blue cheese. When you nod approvingly over a bunch of things on a plate you know there’s a problem.
And then you get to the sunny uplands of the middle dishes, and there is Parle’s familiar spark and twinkle. A pasta dish of tiny shells with long-braised ground sausage, a little chilli and crisped breadcrumbs is what carbs were invented for. There is a thick, starchy broth that binds every shell to the next. We chase the last fabulous crumbs about the dish and feel nurtured. A special of seared veal kidneys, speared on a rosemary twig with cubes of deep-fried bread, the lot blanketed with a brilliant salsa verde, bright with the salty hit of capers, is a simple joy. A burrida of white fish and clams in a chickpea broth is another glorious thing, and a reminder of why we all took Parle to our overfed hearts in the first place.
Then back down we go with desserts. There is little as glum as a sweet end to a meal that is lacking in the sugar department. A huge, tough, fried, sweet pastry “raviolo” is nowhere near sweet enough and its filling of salty cheese doesn’t help. Bottom lips pout. A chocolate cake is a loose pile of something halfway to a thick mousse and, again, is simply not sweet enough; the dollop of cool sour cream doesn’t help. To be fair, dessert was not such a strong suit at the Dock Kitchen either when I ate there, but the rest of the menu was more reliable.
Rotorino is not a disaster. There’s a professional but still laid-back clip to service. There’s a buzz and clatter of the sort that would upset elders of the tribe who have lost the top end of their hearing, but which pleases the Haggerston crowd. There’s also a great proposition. But right now it’s not being delivered. I wanted so very much to love it. And I couldn’t.
Jay’s news bites
■ Russell Norman’s “small plates” Polpo group has become so successful that it’s fashionable to knock them. Tall poppy syndrome can’t disguise the quality or value of the offering, in its four London locations. There’s some quality cooking to be had, not least with their greaseless fritto misto, which shows Rotorino how it should be done (polpo.co.uk).
■ The footballer Fabrice Muamba, who almost died live on television from an undiagnosed heart condition during a game for Bolton Wanderers, has launched a range of Caribbean cooking sauces with his wife. A portion of the sales goes to the charity Arrhythmia Alliance (Hearts & Goals). The charity aims to make defibrillators of the sort that saved Muamba’s life more widely available. The sauces are in Booth’s supermarkets across the northwest (defibssavelives.org).
■ If you want proof of how niche the London restaurant world is, how about this: the capital will soon get a restaurant dedicated entirely to... soufflés. Les Soufflés opens on Beauchamp Place in the autumn. What a lot of hot air.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk. Follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1
