Rita's Bar & Dining, 33-35 Stoke Newington Road, London N16. Meal for two, including wine and service, £60
Rita's Bar & Dining in Dalston is a serious piece of work. Nobody called Rita works there, and to describe eating in the blunt cafeteria space as "dining" is a little like referring to Dalston as Hackney's Latin Quarter. Much of the food here is what my grander US friends would call "the cuisine of the American vernacular" and what the Department of Health would probably like to call "a threat to the wellbeing of the nation". If they could, they would doubtless mark Rita's as a crime scene surrounded by police tape. Indeed, if you were being brutal you would say Rita's is the place for pimped junk food. But let's be nicer and call them American classics, which are so on trend right now that a sauce stain on your shirt can be worn as a fashion statement. London is full of self-consciously smart places serving fried chicken, and hot dogs so fancy you can only drink champagne with them. Let's call it slut chic.
Certainly Rita's has found an audience – a bunch of youthful hipsters who normally wouldn't dream of going to a scuffed high street like this for dinner, despite the fabulous array of Turkish restaurants there, but will make an exception for the siren call of green chilli mac and cheese. Then again, according to their own publicity, this isn't a restaurant. It's a "travelling food and drink collaboration between Real Gold, Jackson Boxer, Gabriel Pryce and Missy Flynn". Nope. Not a clue. Except that I think it means its current location, in the spartan bar area above a music venue, may not be permanent. Queues build nightly.
The one name I do know is Jackson Boxer's, who is also involved with the food at the Brunswick House Café, in an architectural salvage warehouse just south of Vauxhall Bridge. So, what to make of his efforts here? It's a mixed bag with some great highs, a couple of lows and a few mehs.
Pricing is keen, with most items at about £6. Then again, this is a no-frills operation, so let's not get too excited. Best of the lot, served a little knowingly in a brown paper bag, is a Southern-fried chicken roll, the fillet stuffed in a sweet glazed bun. This will probably be the best fried chicken you've ever had, the meat dredged and floured multiple times before its bath in the fat, to give it an outrageous crumb that would make the colonel weep. There's also a finely judged kick of cayenne pepper. Rita's sticky, punchy, shouty soy-and-ginger chicken wings, with crisp cubes of watermelon, were very good indeed. The shredded mounds of long-braised pig cheek spun through with orange, on teeny-weeny tacos, were examples of big French cooking technique pressed into service of something grungier.
Other things weren't so thrilling. The dressing on the little gems and roasted tomato salad was, unlike the leaves, limp. Both the mac and cheese and the green chilli relish on top were under-seasoned. The patty melt is a thin burger with cheese, sandwiched between toasted pieces of caraway-studded rye bread which also appears to have been fried off briefly. Call it the Elvis memorial sandwich. You could eat it and feel yourself to be embracing a piece of pure Americana.
Or, if you're old enough, you could feel yourself swept back to the 1970s of the Golden Egg, when nothing was served unless it had first met boiling fat. Look, I love boiling fat. I love what it does to stuff. But let's not make grandiose claims for the results.
We finished by sharing a piece of salted caramel and chocolate tart with very heavy pastry. One piece was more than enough, which is something of a failing.
Rita's is lots of fun. The staff are young and welcoming and they make a pretty good margarita. Like many of the people coming here, I too would be willing to travel to eat the food, probably from as far away as Finsbury Park. In a crowded city like London that praise really ain't as faint as it looks.
