The Peach Tree and Momo-No-Ki, 18-21 Abbey Foregate, Shrewsbury SY2 6AE (01743 355055). Meal for two, including wine and service: £50-£100
Just outside the loop in the River Severn that encloses the heart of old Shrewsbury, all mullion windows, dark beams and twisted brick, is a mini restaurant row. Here, facing the abbey, is a Cuban bar with an entirely un-Cuban menu of burgers and nachos. There’s a Japanese ramen house next door and a modern British bistro next door to that. It’s like some snapshot of Britain’s restless mid-market restaurant sector, each outlet huddling here for a little reflected warmth from the others.
The fiercely branded frontages suggest three separate businesses. But go inside Havana Republic, the raw wood bar and dangling bulbs nicely offsetting those Tudor beams, and you’ll see a doorway on the right. That leads through to Momo-No-Ki, the ramen bar, with its obligatory blond wood benches and tables. It calls itself “the home of ramen in Shrewsbury” and who am I to argue? Ramen always needs somewhere to lay its head. There’s another doorway that leads into the Peach Tree, an altogether fancier set of spaces with vaulted ceilings, more gnarled beams and shiny, oversized ceramics. In the corner, there’s a digital grand piano, which makes me fear for the Great American Songbook.
So, three restaurants, one space and as it transpires, only one and a half kitchens serving the lot. (It’s the ramen bar that gets the small “half” kitchen.) They belong to the same people, and are all overseen by one chef, Chris Burt. It’s utterly bonkers and shouldn’t work but, in its own sweet, charming, understated way, it does. Indeed, it’s rather good. And why the hell not? If a restaurant heavyweight like Jason Atherton can open modern brasseries, Spanish tapas joints and high-end Japanese gastro-pubs across London, why can’t Chris Burt do the same in Shrewsbury? It just requires attention to detail and a certain gastro-geekiness. It seems Burt has all that. You could bring four generations of your family here and find something to please everyone. Or if you can’t, you should get a new family.
If you do as we did, and order from two of the menus – we ignored the “Cuban” offering – you could end up with an utterly cacophonous meal. That was our choice, not theirs. We could have stuck with dumplings and a bowl of ramen called Umami Bomb (miso-crusted salmon, shio dashi, 62C egg). We could have had gravadlax followed by a steak. Instead we banged around between the two sides.
One dish, the cheerfully named Piggy Bits in Korean BBQ sauce, turns up on both menus. It’s a bowl full of crisped pieces of porker, a bit of belly here, some shoulder there, doused in glugs of a brawling, insistent sweet-savoury soy-based sauce. They serve it with long cocktail sticks, so you can spear the bits of meat you want. It’s £6.50 worth of smacked lips and crunch.
That sauce turns up with two other dishes from the Asian side of the list. It’s an observation. Not a complaint. Being slapped around the face by caramel and umami and fermentation is my idea of a good night out. Fried pork and Chinese leaf dumplings, in their own dark sauce lake, are crisp and hot and perfectly designed to be dropped in the mouth whole.
Their pork bun is slightly weird. I assume it will be one of those puffy, rice flour cloud like jobs folded over and filled, as per the numerous bao joints that have opened recently. These buns are indeed soft and cloudlike, but black and served top and bottom, as if enclosing a burger. We slice them up into pieces like a cake and eat them that way. The burger bao is filled with crisped slices of soft pork belly, pickled cucumber and spring onions, all doused in lots more sweet salty sauce. I suppose I could whinge about the use of the word “scallions” for spring onions on the menu. Shrewsbury is no more in America than, say Hoxton. But I can’t summon the will. It’s both a lot of bun and a lot of fun.
And so to the Peach Tree menu, which includes among its starters a take on Fergus Henderson’s famed roast bone marrow with a parsley salad and sourdough toast. Sadly, it’s off today. Instead we try their duck liver pâté. It comes with a cherry jelly, onion compôte and the sort of fine, rugged toast you could build viable models of Stonehenge out of on a slow night. This is where it becomes interesting. Because as well as making more than agreeable Japanese dumplings, this kitchen can also produce a fine classic pâté, whipped and smoothed and set, with the murmur of an offal kick that anything made from livers should have.
From the main courses, there’s a huge plate of roast chicken, with skin the colour of amber. It’s been pelted with ceps, gnocchi, a cheese crumb, a wild mushroom velouté and bits and pieces of black truffle. It reminds me of the late Michael Winner: it’s stupidly rich, quite absurd but means well and generally makes the world a better place. I find myself drawn to a plate of ham, eggs and chips. Obviously, it’s an impeccable smoked Shropshire ham, with a subtle cure and a dense meaty texture. Obviously the chips are hand cut and crisp, the eggs fried until the whites glisten and the yolks wobble just so. But it is still ham, eggs and chips and I love them for putting it on the menu.
The only misfire is a bread and butter pudding which is under sweetened and served in a custard that could stick paper to walls. Far better is a smooth Banana Split Bavarois, with squares of fudge, a scattering of maple popcorn and a thick scoop of chocolate mousse. These are all sweet things that deserve to hang out together. Until I’ve finished eating them. And all of this served with wit and lack of fuss by a frighteningly young team.
In the past I have issued grave parental warning about menus that are too long; that draw on too many culinary cultures; that appear too damn eager to please. The menus at the Peach Tree and its siblings appear to commit all of these crimes, but are now found not guilty. Don’t be mistaken. It is not some modern wonder of the culinary world. Instead, it’s the sort of smart act any medium-sized town in the UK would want on their high street instead of the myriad Identikit chains. Miraculously, they make it work.
Jay’s news bites
The menu at the Garden House Inn, Durham, isn’t quite as eclectic as that at the Peach Tree, but don’t miss the Korean fried pork, the monkfish with the slap of ’nduja, or the chicken pasty, a thing of true beauty. And all this served in a set of rooms decked out like your nan’s front parlour (gardenhouseinn.com).
A Hackney jazz bar is teaming up with the East London Liquor Company to celebrate the bottling of east London’s first whisky in over a century. The Kansas Smitty’s, house band of the eponymous bar on Broadway Market will serenade the casks over their two-year maturation at a series of gigs in the distillery, ending with the release of both whisky and recordings of the jazz that followed its journey (eastlondonliquorcompany.com).
Further evidence of our sweetening tooth: the Swiss ice-cream brand Mövenpick is to open a new ‘dessert boutique’ in the Intu Metrocentre, Gateshead, to include an affogato Nespresso coffee menu. What a time to be alive.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
