Röski, 16 Rodney Street, Liverpool L1 2TE (0151 7 088 698). A la carte £45 for three courses. Tasting menu £75. Wines from £23
Do you have a birthday coming up that needs celebrating? No? How about a wedding anniversary? Or your parents’ wedding anniversary? Doesn’t matter if they’re dead. An anniversary is an anniversary. It needs marking. You don’t have one of those? Perhaps a pet’s birthday? Or, I dunno, it’s happy Thursday. Just find something worth celebrating, even if it’s merely the gruelling business of being alive, and use it as the excuse to go and eat at Röski in Liverpool. You’ll thank me. More to the point, you’ll thank chef Anton Piotrowski.
I first came across him when he competed on MasterChef: The Professionals in 2012. The dessert he served us was listed as a carrot cake with chocolate soil. We read the description to each other and rolled our eyes: chocolate soil? Oh pur-leaze. This is because we are appalling people who shouldn’t be allowed on television. When it turned up, served in a plant pot, we huffed some more because, really, what’s wrong with bowls and stop trying so bloody hard. Except it was a total joy: yes, whimsical, but also cleverly thought out and executed. Which proves you can do anything you like as long as you’re smart enough. I was not surprised when Piotrowski was named (joint) winner that year.
He’s been on what reality TV shows refer to as a journey since then, literally so, from a pub in rural Devon where he was fully garlanded, through Plymouth to this spot amid the redbrick splendour of Liverpool’s Rodney Street. Röski is a combination of his name and that of Rose, his other half, plus an umlaut because who doesn’t love one of those. Care has been taken with the room: there are the deepening shades of grey on the striped banquettes, the wild flower arrangements from dining room to the loo downstairs, the spindly lighting and the covetable Japanese ceramics. As ever, though, what matters is what those gorgeous bowls contain.
It is has become fashionable to sneer at the complex, and I am more than susceptible to fashion. We venerate simplicity, with good reason. Simple is terrific. If you’ve got great ingredients, offer them up to the best of their own advantage by not doing very much at all. That’s a lovely thing. But there is a place for complicated, if you know what you’re doing.
In this case it starts deceptively simply, with a plate of open-crumbed sourdough from Baltic Bakehouse, with two butters. One is smoked. The other is pre-mixed Marmite butter. And now I am a little in love for here is a flavour of childhood, plonked down right in the heart of the adult experience. There are two menus, a full-on tasting job of a dozen or so small courses for £75 with gnomic titles such as “This little piggy went to Röski” or “Cajun goat”, or a short changing à la carte for £45, with a few bells and whistles.
We go for the latter and start with a bell that rings pure and true: two discs of raw cod that have been marinated in a cool broth of green tea and ponzu. Plankton may have been mentioned, too. It’s then dotted with a wasabi mayo and fennel jam. It’s fresh and bright with a measured acidity, with the light waft of aniseed across the subtle fishiness of the best sashimi. Another small dish brings an impeccable langoustine, sautéed, under a drift of bread crumbs fried in wagyu beef fat, with splodges of garlic mayo. It’s no more than two mouthfuls, but you will recall both of them because they are pure gastronomic smut.
A starter of a meatless red cabbage “bolognese” really doesn’t need the inverted commas, for here are all the flavours of your classic spag bol. And yet it’s as if they’ve been to a Swiss finishing school to learn a bit of refinement. The red cabbage has been diced to within an inch of its life and cooked down in a dizzily intense tomato sauce. There is a dollop of parmesan custard, another of tomato sauce, and a third of a green herb purée. And lo: it is also a tricolore.
From the meatier side there’s a piece of boned-out guinea fowl with thick, crisp skin, a deep jus, slices of truffle, courgette and a courgette purée. I decide it’s now the Spinal Tap of restaurants with every flavour turned up to a welcome 11. It continues with the main courses. There are two pieces of aged sirloin, laid with a couple more rosy langoustines. There are seared leeks and a garlic jus, and on the side a pot of buttery smoked mash, which is so luscious I’m minded to use it on my cheeks as an anti-ageing cream. This is serious, bourgeois cooking, with no interest in the restrained. The kitchen wants you to know you’ve been fed.
Likewise with the fish dish, which changes depending on what’s best available. Today it is sensitively cooked lemon sole which, like me, is both meaty but, at the same time, strangely delicate. Brown shrimps are heaped on top under one of those intense rust-coloured fish sauces, that speaks of roasted shell and claw and a lost night on the Marseilles docks. Alongside is a light, fluffy and crisp salt cod croquette.
We finish with the same carrot cake in a plant pot with which he first made an impact. It’s smaller now, but just as compelling. There is the layer of cream cheese above the carrot and walnut sponge, and a serious hit of citrus popping candy. On the side is an eye-widening carrot and orange sorbet which picks up fragments of crumbed chocolate. Stuck in the middle is yer actual baby carrot. And all this is plated on half a tree trunk, but he can be forgiven because the plating isn’t there to make up for failings in the dish.
Service, by one bright-eyed bearded chap, is effortlessly cool and charming. The nearest to a criticism is the bought-in mediocre chocolates offered as petit fours from a slightly dusty box. They should just make one perfect truffle themselves and leave it at that. Piotrowski and Röski have been through a few struggles to get to this point: a failed crowdfunder, an aborted and overly complicated pre-payment system. But it has now settled down, found its way and is singing. All I can say is: lucky Liverpool.
News bites
Not far away at Heswall on the Wirral is Burnt Truffle, the second restaurant from chef Gary Usher. It serves inspired bistro food in simple surroundings: think braised featherblade of beef with butternut squash purée, lemon sole with beurre noisette and a choux bun with salted caramel sauce to finish. His more recent restaurant Wreckfish is in Liverpool, but I’ve yet to eat there (burnttruffle.net).
Honest Burgers, which became the first restaurant in Europe to serve the vegan Beyond Meat Plant burger, when it was put on the menu at its King’s Cross branch in July 2018, is to roll it out to all 29 of its outlets in London, Cambridge, Reading and Bristol. It will cost £11.50, including a side of its slightly addictive rosemary salted chips (honestburgers.co.uk).
Urmston in Greater Manchester is to get what it’s claiming to be the UK’s first privately owned food market hall. Market 41, which will open in 2019, is expected to house around a dozen operators, focusing on independents and small restaurants, and will have space for 180 covers.
Wasted Calories and Ruined Nights: a Journey Deeper into Dining Hell by Jay Rayner is published by Guardian Faber at £5. Order a copy for £4.30 at guardianbookshop.com
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
