90 Bartholomew Close, London EC1A 7EB (linolondon.co.uk) Small plates £7 to £10; £14 - £19; desserts £6.50; wines from £24
Doing something genuinely new in a restless city is tricky. It’s not obvious how much sharper you can be when everyone around you is trying to be so cutting edge you could slice your finger open on them. Newly opened Lino, housed in a former linoleum factory south of London’s Smithfield meat market, says it offers a “new approach” to eating out. “We re-use, re-love and re-imagine.” Bravo. I’m a big fan of re-loving. I’ve been re-loving myself for years, because what I get up to in my spare time is entirely my own affair. But what exactly does that mean in the context of a restaurant?
In Lino’s case it means they are dancing on the knife edge of modernity, along with quite a few others. It’s why I’ve chosen it for my final review of the year. So much of what they do bellows 2018. They bake their own open-crumbed sourdough bread and culture their own butter. They are big on fermentation. Behold, a killer snack of crisp-shelled croquettes filled with the lactic push of sauerkraut and the sharpest of aged cheddars. Meat and non-meat dishes sit side by side, with equal billing. The kitchen works with the humbler ingredients: so it’s flank steak, mackerel and beetroot, rather than flashy marquee names like names like fillet steak, turbot and truffles.
There is a sparklingly fresh fillet of mackerel grilled until the skin blisters, with crunchy discs of their own pickled cucumber, or hunks of earthy roasted beetroot with an intense, savoury black garlic purée that demands to be licked off fingertips. An oxtail and potato hot-pot is an under-appreciated extremity braised down to its deepest, tangled best. A lasagne of pumpkin and Jerusalem artichoke, made with silky, butter-yellow folds of pasta, is the best of autumn raised up to the luxurious.
It’s all exceptionally accomplished and good value, as you would expect from a chef like Richard Falk who worked alongside Robin Gill at the Dairy in Clapham. It also feels very much like a companion piece to other places I reviewed this year. There’s Jackson Boxer and Andrew Clarke’s Mighty Wurlitzer of a restaurant St Leonards; both have polished concrete floors, industrial ducting and work with less-than-prime cuts. It tucks in alongside the Moorcock Inn, perched high on a hill outside Halifax at Sowerby Bridge, where they cook over open fire, make dishes from dock leaves or smoked carrots, use aged fish and braise the humble leek in butter. You can draw a line between Lino and Yotam Ottolenghi’s new place, Rovi. Both do remarkable things with celeriac, this year’s breakout root vegetable. (Every sentence is a valiant stab at an entry in Pseud’s Corner.) At Lino, roasted celeriac is bathed in a huge, sticky chicken jus. At Rovi it’s the key ingredient in a meat-free shawarma. It pops up at the impressive fish restaurant Cornerstone, with whipped cod’s roe and hazelnuts. Feel the celeriac love. That may be the title of my next jazz album.
This was also the year for being fed well in unexpected places. I did not expect to eat well in a massive Manchester beer hall like Albert’s Schloss, but I really did. Ooh, that crispy pork knuckle with the sour slap of red cabbage, and oh the bratwurst (from Chorlton butcher WH Frost). It is all so much better than it needs to be. I loved the bish and bash of seafood cookery at the Clam and Cork in Doncaster Market, and the staggering value at Träkol on the Gateshead side of the Tyne, which did outrageous things with half a pig’s head. There were the dark and sticky Cantonese spare ribs at the Wok Inn at Blackpool, and the weirdly restless menu at No 1 Cromer – their ramen deserves another mention – which shouldn’t have worked but did.
There was still a place for classicism. I finally made it to Holborn Dining Room and felt an idiot for having left it so long. Chef Calum Franklin’s pie love is so intense it’s practically indecent. Both the pork pie, hot under ponds of gravy, and the curried mutton pie with its flaky overcoat reassured me that in an uncertain world, certain truths hold. At least I was only a couple of years late to the pie party. I was decades late to L’Escargot, but it still did the thing: snails under frothing green lakes of garlic butter, tournedos rossini and a crème brûlée to finish. Sigh.
As usual, fewer than a fifth of my reviews were stinkers, yet they made the most noise, which is always the way. My gentle evisceration of the Farm Girl Café in Chelsea became my second most read review ever. This may have had something to do with me suggesting I was so underfed I could have made quick work of the Yorkshire terrier sitting at the next table. The Birnam Brasserie at Gleneagles offered clumsy classics at stupid prices, Heinz Beck at Brown’s offered overworked Italian food at stupid prices and the Houses of Parliament offered mediocre speed dining at stupid prices.
Ah yes, price. I’ve never been afraid to call out poor value, but some people still object to paying the cost of eating in restaurants no matter what. They point to the existence of food banks or the fact that the bill was the same as they had for the week’s family food budget. They rarely make the same complaints on car reviews or fashion pages. After years of explaining patiently that these were separate issues, I eventually came up with a post on my website in response, so I could simply paste in the link in the comments section online. It was read almost 50,000 times in the first week. Very few of those readers argued with me. Because obviously I’m right.
Albert’s Schloss and L’Escargot aside, too many restaurants simply gave up when it came to dessert. Witness the creamy thing in a bowl with some breakfast cereal for texture. Happily, that’s not the case with Lino. A glazed croissant bread and butter pudding with a caramelised orange marmalade sugared surface was that dreamy combination of squidge and butteriness and sugar. A custard tart in the thinnest of cases was flavoured with Earl Grey tea and wittily partnered with a scoop of a bright lemon sorbet. I ate these things on your behalf. I know. I am selfless. I’m so selfless that I’m going to do it all again in 2019.
News bites
Having looked back on 2018, let’s look forward to three newcomers for 2019. Chef Jason Atherton is turning a space next to his Pollen Street restaurant in London into a tiny 16-seater called H.O.M.E serving an ever-changing menu. Elsewhere in London, Mamma Mia, The Party is coming to the O2 to offer an Abba-themed experience (book at mammamiatheparty.com) and in Manchester, Kala, the latest from Gary Usher of Sticky Walnut fame, will open in February, boasting a head chef with experience at the Raby Hunt.
A study of dishes served by chain restaurants has found they are much higher in calories than those served in fast-food restaurants. The study, by a team at Liverpool University and published in the BMJ, found average restaurant dishes had 1,033 calories, as against 751 calories in the average fast-food outlet.
Talking of chains, the self-styled ‘Chinese gastropub’ Duck and Rice, originally launched by Alan Yau, says it is looking to roll out the brand in the Nordic countries and the Middle East.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
