The Yellow Bittern, 20 Caledonian Road, London N1 9DU (020 3342 2162). Starters £7 – £8; mains £20 – £28; desserts £8 – £9. Wines from £40
Chefs gather in tribes. There are the tweezer chefs and the dude food chefs and the live-fire chefs, wisps of smoke forever rising from their singed eyebrows. Then there are the chef poets. They cleave to texts by Richard Olney and Elizabeth David, like mothers to their newborns. They perv over ingredients. They work backwards from the experience at the table into the kitchen, rather than from the kitchen outwards. And they adore a well-turned phrase. They are romantics.
Belfast-born Hugh Corcoran is very much a chef poet; one who has even published his own volume of writing. He often keeps his trousers up with braces, wears metal-rimmed spectacles and has about him the mien of a 1930s small-town butcher who has a lovely piece of gammon put aside for you. He has cooked in the Basque country and Paris as well as at pop-ups in London, where his pared-down dishes have won him a following. Now comes the Yellow Bittern, which is less a restaurant than a declaration of intent via the medium of lunch. It opens only on weekdays for two sittings, at noon and 2pm, and not at all for dinner. Bookings can only be made by phone or “postcard” and they accept only cash. There is no printed wine list because “it is all in Hugh’s head”, but the offering is entirely natural and runs from £40 a bottle (and £10 a glass) to £300.
The Yellow Bittern, named after an 18th-century Irish poem about a bird who couldn’t crack the ice with his beak to get a drink, occupies the King’s Cross home of Luncheon, a biannual cultural magazine edited by Lady Frances von Hofmannsthal. Accordingly, there is a bookshop on-site which occupies an institutional space in the basement that looks like the library of a TB sanatorium circa 1936. Here are works by Seamus Heaney and Samuel Beckett just as, upstairs, in the sparse, yellow-walled dining room, which seats only 18, there hangs a photograph of Brendan Behan, alongside a portrait of Lenin.
This, according to one of Corcoran’s Instagram posts, is a prized possession that goes everywhere with him, for he is a lifelong communist, devoted to many causes, including anti-colonialism in general and a United Ireland in particular. A recent Corcoran Instagram post celebrating the founder of the Soviet Union as the “liberator of the slaves” was met with comments detailing Vladimir Ilyich’s complicity in the murderous Red Terror and the founding of the gulags, among other things. How you engage with his politics, which might stick in the throat of some, is entirely up to you. You can just go for lunch, as Fergus and Margot Henderson, the chef poets-in-chief, have already done, along with many other chefs from across London. The day we are there, for example, another table is occupied by a party of cooks from Noma in Copenhagen. The Yellow Bittern had been open for just six working days and was already a point of pilgrimage.
The tiny dining room with its paper-clothed tables has a small open kitchen boasting a single oven and an induction ring. Laid out across the bar when we arrive, alongside a barrel of warm ale, are many baked goods: bricks of cloud-grey soda bread, neatly tucked guinea fowl pies for £40 to be shared between two, and a huge glossy, quilted disc of apple pie for dessert. The limited menu is scribbled up on a blackboard and its best is delightful. That nutty soda bread is served with generous wedges of yellow butter that can be spread so thickly you can set your teeth marks into it. The butter is unsalted, but there’s a dish of the white stuff on the table so you can add your own hypertension. Among the platters on the bar were shiny leaves of simmered leek, which we are told by Lady Frances in a whisper, were pulled from her country garden “only yesterday”. They arrive topped with a nose-twitching grain mustard vinaigrette, chopped boiled eggs and fresh green herbs, a version of the recipe in Simon Hopkinson and Lindsay Bareham’s Roast Chicken and Other Stories.
While I am enjoying that, I see Corcoran heave from the oven a joint of crackling-bodiced pork; a fabulous piece of meat, sensitively cooked, which is sliced thickly and plonked on top of a heap of white beans for £28. At the end comes a wedge of that apple pie, which has that all-important third interface layer where the sweet stewed apple has merged with the pastry’s inner thigh to create a grand sugar, fruit and butter softness. We have cheeses, too, including St Tola goat’s and a blue called Young Buck, which softens the funking glass of natural red my companion orders. This lunch makes the point about simplicity’s virtues well.
But there’s another lunch here, in which the whole performative nature of it leaves you muttering about having been served school dinners, only at Hackney natural wine bar prices. A dreary leek and potato soup, thick as wallpaper paste for £7, is served tepid. For the main there’s a bowl of sausages and potatoes in broth listed as Dublin Coddle, a mellifluous name that cannot disguise the fact it’s two bought-in Cumberland sausages, some potatoes and broth for £20. The sludgy baked rice pudding is served cold. In its oval dish on the bar, it looked rather cheering; on the plate it looks like something your elderly cat might have coughed up. There is a fine line between celebrating simplicity and just not putting your back into it. Impressively, the Yellow Bittern walked both sides of that line across one lunch. A few days later, Corcoran complained on Instagram that diners weren’t ordering enough. “Restaurants are not public benches,” he moaned. “You are there to spend some money.” Perhaps open for dinner then, when people are happier to drink.
The comic thing about the whole venture is that it sells itself as cool and radical. This is a restaurant by an arty set, who publish a cultural magazine and have scythed away at the fripperies of the 21st century, such as credit card payments and a website. In effect, though, it plays as the small-c conservatism of John Major’s wistful speech about a fantasy England of “warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and – as George Orwell said – old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist”. That reference will doubtless drive an old communist like Hugh Corcoran absolutely nuts. It doesn’t make it any less appropriate.
News bites
Following the recent news that gift vouchers worth thousands of pounds will not be honoured following the closure of Birmingham restaurant Purnell’s, because it’s now in receivership, comes a rather bigger voucher story from the US. TGI Fridays there has declared bankruptcy. According to the hospitality industry newsletter Propel, there’s a risk that franchisees will be left responsible for outstanding vouchers, the $50m value of which far exceeds available cash reserves. Lawyers for the company have, however, said, they intend to honour their obligations. Meanwhile in Leeds, the company behind chef Michael O’Hare’s restaurant Man Behind the Curtain, which more recently traded as Psycho Sandbar, has been wound up with debts close to £1m.
In Lyme Regis, it’s farewell to chef Mark Hix’s Oyster and Fish House, after 16 years of trading. The last service will be on 7 December, after which the restaurant will be under new ownership. Hix says he has no plans to open any new restaurants, but that he’s working on various projects and will continue to run his Kitchen Table events from his Charmouth home.
Great British Menu winner Kirk Haworth and his sister and business partner Keeley, have announced the launch next spring of a French farm and retreat, to go alongside their plant-based restaurant Plates, which opened in Shoreditch in July to enormous demand for tables. The new venture, in the Lot-et-Garonne, will have seven bedrooms, alongside a gym and sauna. Four-night packages start from £1,000 per person. Find more information here
Join Jay Rayner and Grace Dent on Monday 16 December as they discuss his new cookbook Nights Out At Home, live at Kings Place and livestreamed globally. Book tickets here or at guardian.live
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on X @jayrayner1
• This article was amended on 19 November 2024. An earlier description of an 18th-century poem as “Gaelic” has been changed to “Irish”.
