London Shell Co, The Prince Regent, Regent’s Canal at Paddington,
London W2 6EP (londonshellco.com). Lunch for two, including drinks
and service: £70. Dinner: £120
Dinner at London Shell Co is the stuff of nightmares. Admittedly, these are only my nightmares. They should not be held against a restaurant which at the right time of day – that being lunch rather than dinner, as far as I’m concerned – and in the right weather, can be a delight. These nightmares of mine relate to it being housed in a converted 30-year-old canal barge. From Wednesday to Friday evenings that barge sets sail along London’s Regent’s Canal from Paddington to Camden and back again. You get on at 7.30pm; you get off at 10.30pm. For the intervening hours you are cruising along the capital’s hidden waterway, being served a £45-a-head, regularly changing set menu.
Oh God. This brings back terrifying memories of my teenage years when affluent kids I knew held parties on Thames cruisers. Experience taught me to hate them. Within half an hour of setting off from Charing Cross Pier towards Tower Bridge half the boat would be drunk. The boat then turned around and the other half caught up. At which point it would turn into a war zone of inebriation, vomit and thwarted lust.
The chemical toilets would overflow, the meagre portions of terrible food would run out and the girl I wanted to snog would be spotted up on the boat’s sharp end tonsil deep in some boy she had only just met. However hard I tried not to look at them they would always be there, love’s young dream, silhouetted against London’s mockingly beautiful light-jewelled skyline. On a boat, there is nowhere to hide. Whenever I arrive at a party I always make sure to clock the exits, in case a quick getaway is necessary. A party on a boat on the water is a party without an exit.
Likewise, a dinner on a boat on the water. At lunchtime, however, the children’s picture book barge is tied up a short stumble from Paddington’s Hammersmith and City tube exit. What’s more, it stays there, serving a short, well-priced and also changing menu of simple, uncluttered dishes that demand to be liked. You can eat them and then, praise be, get off any time you choose. As with many of London’s more interesting ventures right now, it began as a pop-up on dry land, led by actor-turned-sommelier Harry Lobek and his sister Leah. In the small, diesel-powered kitchen at one end is Stuart Kilpatrick, an alumnus of the Mark Hix empire, and his pared down, less-is-more approach, making big platefuls from humble ingredients, is evident.
The lunch menu lists four small plates for £5 each and four mains at £10, or £12 with a glass of house wine. Sizable pieces of cod come breaded and deep fried with a smooth pot of a dill mayonnaise the colour of freshly cut grass, full of flavour but no grassy bits to get stuck in your teeth. Smoked cod’s roe, a little pink, but properly granular and rugged, as if it could grout a bathroom if there was nobody around to eat it, comes alongside nutty, brown crackers made with the slight lactic tang of buttermilk. We snap and dredge, getting our fingers slippery with the cod’s roe.
Most pleasing of all are discs of ox tongue, cooked so they hold their integrity until your fork gets involved, with cubes of pickled root vegetables, and a horseradish cream that makes you wrinkle your nose. It’s the sort of thing your Mitel European great aunt would serve you if you had one; not out of some gastronomic obsession with tongues and tails, but because that’s what they did in the old country. It is the taste of tea time in a slightly overheated St John’s Wood mansion block, prepared by someone who wants to recall where they came from.
Thick fillets of fresh mackerel, the zigzagged skin charred in places but glossy and bright in others, lie on a thicket of purple sprouting broccoli, scattered with rings of sliced fresh red chills and toasted almond flakes. It’s not so much a dish as a jolly good idea. (Incidentally, on a couple of menus recently, though happily not here, I’ve seen purple sprouting broccoli listed as PSB. Is that a thing? Is it? Well, stop it. There’s no excuse. Or I’ll be SBPO: Seriously Bloody Pissed Off.)
As per Wilson’s in Bristol recently, there is a pasta dish for the non-meat eaters, and what a meaty piece of work it is. Ribbons of pappardelle, broad and butter yellow with bite and heft, are dressed with generous shaving of salty Berkswell cheese, and bright green flashes of pungent wild garlic. Laid across this are thick slices of king oyster mushroom, cross-hatched and seared to a delightful bronze.
The wine list, from which the glasses of house at that extra £2 are chosen, is a rather beautiful thing: both relatively short and idiosyncratic. It is full of bottles I’d never heard of, and priced for experimentation, with lots of choice in the 30s and below; almost every white and red is available by the glass. It leans towards France, with a few choices from Italy and England.
Most of all, there is the mood in here on a spring lunchtime. The waters of the Regent’s Canal may, notoriously, be the colour of a crow’s wing, a polished shimmering black, but the sunlight bounces off it and into the body of the barge that houses the dining room, dappling the ceiling. (On a cold rainy day, with the wind giving its all, it may be less hospitable.) There are varnished floorboards and tables, and at one end, beneath a canopy that looks like it could be removed, a place for drinks. Occasionally another barge chunters past creating a micro wash which causes your seat to lift and fall, but otherwise all is still. Beyond the shore-side windows, the calves of pedestrians pass by.
The small kitchen does not lend itself to fireworks at dessert. A crisp-shelled meringue comes with clotted cream and logs of stewed rhubarb. Alternatively, there is soft, stinky Tunworth cheese, ready to run across your plate, with dates and more buttermilk crackers. At night, you can board early for a drink, listen to the sort of safety announcement you don’t generally get before dinner in London, then set sail with the gutter of candles and the thrum of the engine for company. It may be your thing. It’s not mine. But then we know that.
Jay’s news bites
Like London Shell Co, Blandford Comptoir in Marylebone is a business led by a sommelier, which also pays proper attention to the food. Xavier Rousset has put together a list of wines that are by turns big, small and intriguing. Meanwhile chef Ben Mellor’s food takes various routes around the Mediterranean. Go for red prawns with Amalfi lemon oil and roast quail with a truffle boudin (blandford-comptoir.co.uk).
Lymington is holding its first seafood festival on August 12 and 13. It will host 70 producers and pop up restaurants from the likes of Chewton Glen, the Montagu Arms and Careys Manor, all spotlighting the water’s finest (lymington seafoodfestival.co.uk).
James Close, chef of the award-winning Raby Hunt in County Durham, has launched his own range of chocolates alongside kitchen colleague Maria Guseva. The chocolates, including a skull flavoured with honey, rosemary and yuzu and a black truffle caramel chocolate, will be available in Fenwick, Newcastle until late May.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
