Brat, 4 Redchurch Street, London E1 6JL (bratrestaurant.com). Meal for two, including drinks and service, £80-£120
There’s a glossy kind of over-engineered food television which, whatever its other virtues, provides a brilliant workout for my throwing arm. It’s the cooking demo stuff, narrated by a restaurant chef who insists upon peppering every stage of the process with the word “simply”. Now “simply bone out the entire chicken” or “simply make a brioche dough” or “simply carve a representation of the fall of Saigon out of chilled dripping as a table centrepiece”. While it would be unfair to name the guilty (Gary Rhodes, I’m looking at you for starters), I’m not ashamed to admit it has me reaching for the nearest piece of soft fruit. My aim is getting pretty good.
One of the greatest lies ever told by our food media is that all cooking is easy or simple or straightforward. It isn’t. A lot of it is complicated and frustrating and unreliable and, like an outbreak of bantz between Jeremy Clarkson and Piers Morgan, extremely irritating. It takes practice, larded with enough greed to encourage you to press on however often you screw up. You fail, then do it again in the hope that next time, you will fail better.
Forget your boudins and your soufflés, your hand-raised pies and boned-out pigs’ trotters. That sort of show cooking may be tough, but trickier still is the seemingly effortless; the edible equivalent of, say, Anthony Hopkins’s performance in The Remains of the Day. For most of the movie Hopkins appears to do nothing. He says little, reacts sparely. But his face tells you all you need to know. Tomos Parry’s cooking at Brat is the culinary equivalent of a Hopkins performance. For the most part it is simplicity itself. Some of it seems to be less cooking than assemblage. And then you eat.
Take a dish entitled “chopped egg salad with bottarga”. It’s a thick slice of still-warm toast topped with a crushed mess of an egg, also just still warm, the yolk languidly fixed between solid and soft, overlaid with shavings of cured and dried grey mullet roe. The cosy nursery softness of the egg is punctuated by the salty, grown-up hit of the bottarga. I found myself wondering drowsily about going home and smearing toast with the anchovy-boosted fireworks of Gentleman’s Relish, then pelting it with soft boiled eggs. What larks. Which is how this kind of cooking deceives you. It looks so simple. Surely, it’s more an idea than a recipe. But I suspect that if you went home and tried it yourself, it would be a massive disappointment and the evening would end badly. Parry knows exactly what he’s doing. You’re paying him just £5 to do it. That’s a good deal. Don’t complain. Let him.
I first tried Parry’s food at Kitty Fisher’s in Mayfair, which for a while was the restaurant everyone talked about in eye-rolling, hushed tones. I was meant to feel clever just for getting through the door, but the meal I had didn’t quite do it for me. It seemed little more than solid bistro cooking at gold-plated Mayfair, “I have a three o’clock colonic” prices. And yet here, in this clubbable wood-lined first-floor space in Shoreditch (above the latest incarnation of Thai barbecue place, Smoking Goat), it’s a revelation. By the door is the open kitchen, dominated by the sparking embers of the burning coals, because in 2018, every cook worth their hand-mined salt wants to cook like an 18th-century hearth jockey. Who needs gas or electricity when you can singe your eyebrows nightly?
The restaurant is supposed to celebrate Parry’s Welsh heritage by way of the open-fire cooking of the Basque country. To complicate things even more, Brat is apparently an old English term for turbot, one of the star ingredients on a short list of major grillable items. Whatevers! And so on. I’m meant to be interested in Welsh heritage and Basque peasant culture, but all I care about is the end result. Here, the end result is a blistered and golden grilled fish. The night we are there, every other table seems to have ordered a whole turbot. It is brought to us by one of the brigade who cheerily points out some of the not-to-be-missed sights, as if it were less a food item than a city mini-break: here are the plump cheeks, over there the rich, oily flesh around the collar, and don’t miss out the pristine fillets.
The smaller turbot costs a gulp-inducing £55. Then you start working your way through its flesh and realise there is enough here for three (£65 gets you a bigger fish; find some friends). It is slow-cooked over indirect heat for half an hour and spritzed with vinegar from time to time. The result is a soft, lightly sticky skin that seems to melt on the tongue, and pearly flesh. Alongside is a simply dressed salad of sweet, taut-skinned tomatoes, plus buttery “smoked” new potatoes which have been allowed to slump in on themselves over the fire.
This is the pinnacle of a meal with many high points. Before its arrival, we have cockles served in the shell in a light broth thickened with chicken livers. Two discs of a butch wild rabbit boudin come with another of spiced black pudding, on a stew of white beans, with a dribble of salsa verde. An option listed as spider crab, cabbage and fennel leaves me a little breathless. The brown meat has been smeared across the bottom of the plate. Sliced fennel has been slow-cooked then allowed to cool before being mixed with the crab. The cabbage seems to come in the form of the “crispy seaweed” served in Chinese restaurants, the green flecks lending an Asian touch to what is a perfect example of simplicity executed with indecent amounts of skill and good taste.
There is lemon tart or baked cheesecake to finish, which is a pleasing change from the “will this do?” of creamy things in a bowl. Both are models of their kind. Happily, the wine list follows Nuala’s lead from a few weeks back by being broken down into categories from unthreatening through classics to fearsome and gnarly. Is it cheap? No. Is it good value? At £6.50 for the cockle dish and £9.50 for the spider crab, yes. Of course, it’s achingly Shoreditch and so staunchly Now, which is enough to put most people’s backs up. But all that fashion blather doesn’t change a thing. The food at Brat is both seemingly effortless and utterly lovely.
Jay’s news bites
On a quick trip to Paris I stumbled on the brilliant Semilla on the Left Bank’s Rue de Seine, an airy space with a light menu which at lunchtime breaks down to a non-meat, fish and meat choice at €40 (£35)for three courses. It might be a lightly dressed tartar of bream to start, followed by slow-cooked belly pork, and a mandarin sorbet with meringue to finish (semillaparis.com).
A company called Tile Acoustics, which normally installs noise-reducing acoustic panels in offices, has just been employed by Aldo’s, an Italian restaurant in Bradford. The new ceiling tiles, designed to match the restaurant’s décor, have apparently reduced noise reverberation by over 50%. Could other hard-surfaced restaurants please take note (tileacoustics.co.uk).
An (admittedly small) study by the umbrella organisation Champions 12.3 has found that hotels which invest in food waste reduction measures are saving £7 for every £1 spent on the process, and 95% recoup their entire investment within two years (champions123.org).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
