DOCK KITCHEN, PORTOBELLO DOCK, 342 LADBROKE GROVE, LONDON W10 (020 8962 1610). MEAL FOR TWO, INCLUDING SERVICE, £70
Earlier this year, after I reviewed an "underground" restaurant in Brixton, I was asked by a TV executive whether there might be a show in the burgeoning movement. I said absolutely not, because I expected the whole thing to be transitory; that while a hardcore would keep running restaurants from their living room, most people would pack it in, having discovered just how tough it is. I couldn't have been more wrong. There are half a dozen different TV shows built around the notion of restaurants in people's living rooms currently working their way on to our screens.
Even so, I'm still not convinced the pop-up movement is as important as some claim. It has been said that it is to the restaurant business what punk was to music – an attempt to break out of the corporate stranglehold and get back to the essence of what food cooked for you by others should be about. But punk was about the antisocial and the anti-conventional, about gobbing and piercing and clothes stained with bodily fluids, not because these things were fun but because they offended polite society. All restaurants, even the pop-up ones, actually still are polite society.
The bottom line being that if I'm going to a pop-up restaurant I want it to be about the food, not the politics. Which is why I very much like the Dock Kitchen. It's run by Stevie Parle, a young chef with impeccable connections to, and experience at, the River Café. For a while he ran the Moveable Restaurant, which floated around various London locations. Earlier this year he turned up at the Portobello Dock development in a lovely, if slightly hidden space – glass, metalwork, heavy wood, overlooking water – owned by the designer Tom Dixon.
At lunch the menu is the very definition of ingredient-led. Shortly after we'd sat down, Parle popped over to say he had just received some English ceps. He'd do them any way we liked. I asked how much. He shrugged. "Probably about 12 quid?" It was all very civilised. I asked for them sautéed on toast, and he charged a tenner for perfect slices of the king of wild mushrooms, lightly caramelised with a burst of garlic and salty butter and parsley. Alongside this we had a simple, crunchy fennel salad perked up with a squeeze of lemon juice and just enough chilli.
For mains we had grilled rabbit on a pile of puy lentils, brightened with a carefully balanced vinaigrette. Even better was an onglet, one of the great if undervalued steak cuts, that had been long marinated then grilled, and served not as a flat piece but more of cylinder: black outside, purple within. You knew this came from an animal that had lived. Alongside was the prosaic made gloriously elegiac: cauliflower cheese laid with salted anchovy fillets baked until they were falling apart into the heat-crusted, cheese-busted sauce.
The weak point was the desserts: an overcooked Bakewell tart and a quince crumble which was simply uninspiring. I suspect they can do better and we just got unlucky. No matter.
Because they are unlicensed (which they hope will change by 8 December), it's a BYO deal and the bill for really very good food indeed never manages to mount up too heavily. Service is friendly and lightly chaotic without heading into the amateurish. In short, while the pop-up restaurant scene may not be as ground-breaking as some argue, it has certainly brought us benefits. The Dock Kitchen is one of them.★
