Editor’s note: we have decided that, while restaurants remain open, we will continue to review them
Townsend at the Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, London E1 7QX (020 7522 7896). Snacks/starters £4-£9, mains £16-£21, desserts £6-£7, set menu £20, wines from £24
Every few days Sam Sifton, a former restaurant critic for the New York Times and now one of that newspaper’s most senior editors, emails out a newsletter full of cheery cooking tips and recipe ideas. The tone of a recent instalment suggests that Sifton, a quietly urbane man with the air of someone who has seen quite enough of everything thank you very much, is starting to lose it. After an impeccably polite “Good morning” he went on to detail the woes bedevilling his country: the fires across the American west, the rising unemployment, the crash and grind of political tensions, the scourge of systemic racism, the growing pestilence of social isolation that “has led to increases in overdoses, to declines in mental health, to loneliness so intense as to be personified”.
That was paragraph one. Paragraph two started: “And I’m here to sell you on a pan-fried eggplant with chilli, honey and ricotta?” The sweet tone of bafflement is understood. Are we really going to be celebrating such small things, when there are so many huge calamities pressing themselves against our front doors, trying to get in? If existential threat had a smell, the air would be stinking right now. His conclusion: yes we are, for it is the small things we must cling to in times like these.
As someone who labours in the same fields as Sifton, I can only say: “Amen, brother!” We must take our pleasures where we may. We must celebrate the everyday. Townsend, a restaurant located inside the Whitechapel Gallery in London’s East End, is one of those pleasures. This may read like faint praise. It’s the opposite. No, it’s not the sort of restaurant to make you swoon at inventiveness, or dazzle you with shiny ideas. It’s a place where you go with a friend so as to get lost in the chatter, only then to clock just how well you are being fed; just how much good taste and care is being brought to bear on such good ingredients.
It’s all there in the restaurant’s DNA. The head chef is Joe Fox, who used to run the kitchen at Petersham Nurseries, long lauded for the way it priorities flavour over prissy presentation. He was recruited by Nick Gilkinson, who has previously worked at the bistro Anglo and, more significantly, the delightful café at the Garden Museum by Lambeth Bridge. Like the latter, this feels like a dining room designed to keep the world at bay. It’s panelled in honey-coloured wood and rimmed with banquettes upholstered in leather the shade of the best milk chocolate. The midcentury-modern tables and chairs are reassuringly spaced. It’s a sweet, warm contrast to the cold, hard stone of the Whitechapel Gallery within which it is housed (designed by Charles Harrison Townsend from whom the name is taken). Outside, traffic thunders by on the Whitechapel Road, as if making its escape. In here, all is right with the world.
From the snacks list we have croquettes of Devon blue cheese, their crisp, deep-fried shells giving way to a semi-liquid centre of stinky loveliness. They perch on a puddle of fermented chilli sauce, a rough-hewn, homemade version of sriracha with a vitality and freshness that doesn’t come from a plastic bottle. It’s an edible bugle call right in the lugholes. Wake up. Lunch is here.
There are four starters and four mains, some of which read as little more than assemblies of great ingredients. Take quail’s eggs, treacle-cured trout and purple sprouting broccoli. Go on. Take them. You know you want to. The eggs are soft boiled so the doll’s house yolks lubricate the plate. The folds of lightly cured trout have been brought to room temperature. There is a dribble of vinaigrette across the broccoli. You fork it away as you talk and soon realise, looking down at the very last scraps, that you’ll miss it when it’s gone. The same is true of a salad of soft-roasted, spiced aubergine, which has been removed from its skin and cubed, with roasted peppers and a snowfall of rowdy Ticklemore cheese. Is it a looker? Not especially. It’s a masterclass in the virtues of beige. But then it’s not for looking at. It’s for eating.
From the mains there is a plate of Mayan potatoes, prepared in the way that is becoming so familiar in London right now that I suspect you have to get permission to not do them this way: they are sliced, baked, pressed and chilled, then deep-fried to create a slab of something golden and striated with echoing shelves of crunch. This potato raft – we all need a potato raft in our lives – is piled with crisped wild mushrooms, surrounding a soft egg yolk. Over the top is finely grated parmesan, curls of black truffle and more chipsticks of fried potato. What a terrific mess the kitchen has made for £16. A couple of quid more brings an impeccable pork chop, with roasted squash, brown butter, hazelnuts and sage leaves. We have dressed tomatoes on the side for a blush of colour.
There is a short wine list which appears to want to sell us wine rather than ideology. We have a glass each because it’s lunchtime and work beckons, but there is still time for dessert: a soft baked cheesecake, with sweet plums of the deepest purple roasted with thyme; and a deep-filled treacle tart, which kitchens seem to love making at the moment. Fine by me.
With unfortunate timing they opened in February, only to close almost immediately. They turned their website into an online shop, offering not just recipe boxes but a range of quality produce via their supplier, Natoora, as well as their own items, like that fermented chilli sauce. The shop is still open and, since mid-July, the restaurant is back, too. Come here and let them feed you. Alongside the à la carte, they do breakfast, and a set menu at £20 for three courses.
Will any of this banish the sort of things Sam Sifton of the New York Times howled about in his newsletter? No, of course not. Deep-fried Mayan potatoes or an expertly roasted aubergine are marvellous, but they’re not miracle cures. However, what they can do is fix you in the present tense and, by holding you there, cheer you up. If anybody asks you what the point of a restaurant like Townsend is right now, tell them it is this: to make things just that little bit better.
News bites
Claims by the restaurant business that the Covid-19 restrictions – first the rule of six, then the 10pm curfew, now the non-mixing of households – are not justified by the low transmission rates within those restaurant, have received a boost by the findings of a new survey from industry body UK Hospitality. The survey of over 12,500 venues for the 14 weeks since reopening found they had been notified of just 780 cases among customers, out of 250 million guest visits. That’s a rate of .0003%.
Zak Jones, who owned both the Chancery in London’s Holborn and the Clerkenwell Dining Room, is to launch a major project in 2021 in Ilkley, West Yorkshire. Moss and Moor will be a 230-seat venue as part of a large garden centre, and will create about 30 jobs. The café will open seven days a week for breakfast, lunch and afternoon tea and will sit alongside a food hall.
And further developments in the restaurant meal kit delivery sector, with the arrival of Restokit. The service launches with a set of London restaurants including Nieves Barragán’s Spanish restaurant Sabor, French restaurant Galvin La Chapelle, the Sri Lankan Kolamba and the Indian Brigadiers, before rolling out nationwide (restokit.co.uk).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
