The Blue Stoops, 127-129 Kensington Church Street, London W8 7LP. Bar snacks £4-£12, starters £6-£15, mains £19-£26, desserts £10-£12, wines from £38
There are many who believe a true pork scratching should be a challenging affair; that you should stumble across the odd one so rich in bristles you don’t know whether to eat it or comb it. There should be others that present an invitation to suckle. The pork scratchings at the Blue Stoops in Kensington are, like the street it occupies, rather more refined. No deep-fried nipples here. The pig skin has been scraped of fat, simmered then dehydrated, before being puffed up on service to a hand’s length in the deep fat fryer. They arrive, salt and chilli-dusted and still warm, tucked into a beer glass, looking like some creamy-coloured mineral accretion dug out of a cave. They have crunch and a pleasing collagen stickiness and are more like a Mexican chicharrón than a friendly tooth-destroyer from the Black Country.
The political wing of the Pub Liberation Front, an entirely fictitious but believable organisation representing the chapped-lipped outrage of those who don’t hold with pubs being places where you can eat too well, might like to add these so-called scratchings to the charge sheet. They may, however, find it tricky to make a case against the Blue Stoops. This is an old pub location, newly renamed after the long-gone 18th-century birthplace of the Allsopp’s brewery in Burton-on-Trent, a town regarded as the home of British brewing. Accordingly, in the saloon bar they have a range of cask ales, including Allsopp’s Best Bitter at £5.50 a pint, and their IPA at £6.50.
Jamie Allsopp, a direct descendant of founder Samuel, is proud of the fact they have also revived Double Diamond, which in the 1970s sold over 50m pints a year. I am invited to try it, but decline because the memories of something pale, fizzy and uninteresting are too sharp. I acknowledge being less than a big beer drinker, but I recall it as a pint which, in late adolescence, I downed in such volume it felt like something I rented rather than bought, so swiftly did it travel through me. The barman tells me the new version is much better than it once was. This raises a question: is it actually Double Diamond, or a new pale ale with an old name? Anyway, that’s on tap and there’s lots of Allsopp’s memorabilia, including framed 19th-century receipts and a rather splendid mirror. The renovation has pubby heft. In the dining room at the back there are tan leather banquettes, and handsome, finely bevelled pedestal tables.
To oversee the food, they have brought in Lorcan Spiteri, a reassuring name, who learned his craft at Quo Vadis alongside Jeremy Lee and later opened Caravel. He has come up with a selection of robust dishes with grace notes. Alongside those scratchings, the bar menu includes battered monkfish goujons with curry sauce and a caramelised onion and Wigmore cheese tart. It’s the sort of place where they tell you the breed of pig that went into the bacon-wrapped chipolatas, served with the nose-punching mustard. Middle White, since you asked. We are not in Burton-on-Trent any more, Dorothy. We’re very much in Kensington, where the mostly European wine list includes funky, skin-contact bottles and you nod at the pricing and say, “Not bad, given the neighbourhood.”
Tonight’s starters in the dining room include a globe artichoke vinaigrette. I will immediately declare love for anywhere that serves one of these, on a point of principle. It may be dun-coloured and vaguely threatening if you haven’t encountered one before. It has a carnivorous Venus-flytrap aspect and you would be forgiven for wondering who is going to be eating whom. But it’s the best kind of tactile food, and engrossing. This, I know, is partly nostalgia on my part. They always came out for my parent’s 1970s dinner parties, where the air smelt for the night of perfume and my mother’s cigars. Therefore, they speak to me of sophistication. I relive a moment of that simply by eating it. This one is served just a little too warm for my taste and the vinaigrette is heavy on the mustard. There’s also not quite enough of that, but we get a second pot. There’s also a salad of soft, squidgy, roasted onions, beetroot, peppery watercress and jammy boiled eggs. It is an assembly of good things put together by someone with great taste.
The main courses speak both fluent pub and fluent cosmopolitan British bistro. From the latter there is a chilli-spiked fennel, samphire and cuttlefish stew, with a shellfish-rich broth that tastes like Marseilles smells when the breeze is coming in off the sea. It demands to be spooned away. From the pub side of the ledger comes both a pork chop and a beef and ale pie, because the room would be naked without it. Yes, it is an oval dish of beef stew with a pastry lid. I refer you to the Pub Liberation Front who will doubtless take legal advice on whether this is a pie or not. I wouldn’t wish to prejudice the case. But as an expert witness, because I’ve eaten a few pies in my time, I offer up the fact that it is a very good and very deep stew full of spoonable meat, enclosed by a crisp suet-pastry crust the colour of shiny 2p pieces. It cracks when the spoon goes in and there is the bonus of the crusty bits that have formed a skirt around the dish’s edge. A side of tenderstem broccoli with fresh chilli and garlic is extremely fond of the chilli.
The dessert list includes something described as a sticky date pudding with toffee sauce, which sounds like an attempt to serve a sticky toffee pudding without quite admitting to it, because it feels like a cliché. We have the caramelised-apple crumble tart, which fits the description. It is deep-filled with apples that have been cooked to an almost toffee-ed chewiness and is topped with a sweet, crunchy rubble. It comes with a generous jug of warm crème Anglaise.
That’s a great closing sentence isn’t it and sums up the Blue Stoops: a group of seriously experienced hospitality professionals, who like both their food and their beer, have come together to create their version of a welcoming pub, while attempting not to look like they’ve been trying too hard to get it right, even though they have. Enough properly made custard with dessert is a part of the deal. As ever with good places to eat, which this very much is, it’s all about the details.
News bites
It’s already been reported widely, but deserves to be noted here: chef Gary Usher of Elite Bistros in the English northwest, has closed Burnt Truffle in Heswall on the Wirral after 10 years. It was the second restaurant in the group after Chester’s Sticky Walnut and was reported to be the first in the UK to use the crowdfunding model. In a video Usher said, “We had a 10-year lease and that’s come to an end. The honest truth is I’ve never been able to make it work here and I have been quite vocal about how difficult the government has made it. The best decision for us is to close.” The group’s six other venues continue to trade (elitebistros.com).
Meanwhile in Edinburgh’s Stockbridge, chef Henry Dobson, who trained at Ballymaloe in Ireland and Noma in Copenhagen, is opening the Scandinavian-inspired Moss. More than 90 of the ingredients used will be sourced from his family’s farm in Angus, and all of it will come from Scotland. Everything will be made in-house including, apparently, the duck smoked over shavings from the wood used to build the tables. The wine list will “focus solely on British made natural and low intervention wines.” Moss opens on 29 January. Follow them on Instagram @moss_edinburgh.
Rick Stein is celebrating the 50th birthday of the Seafood Restaurant in Padstow by running a menu at 1974 prices from 6-9 February. Shellfish soup will be 50p, a ragout de coquilles St Jacques et turbot a la crème de basilic will be 65p and grilled lobster will be £2.80. The limited menu will be available at the flagship restaurant in Padstow, as well as at the branches of Stein’s in Barnes, Winchester, Marlborough and Sandbanks. Bookings open on 24 January (rickstein.com).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Instagram @jayrayner1
