Latest opening: Restaurant St. Barts
What: An impressively high reaching and neatly refined tasting menu restaurant that’s just opened in Smithfield. Housed on the ground floor of a smart new development on Bartholomew Close, Restaurant St. Barts has been designed to showcase ‘hyper-seasonal’ British produce from small-scale farmers and conservationists through a 15-course menu.
Who: Restaurant St. Barts is the latest venture from Johnnie Crowe, Luke Wasserman and Toby Neill, the team behind neighbourhood London restaurants Nest in Hackney and Fenn in Fulham. By all measures, St. Barts is a much more ambitious proposition for the trio and has previously been described by them as being the restaurant they’ve ‘always dreamed of opening’.
The food: Crowe leads the restaurant as executive head chef, and has overseen development of the menu. The restaurant’s mission is to ‘champion ingredients in their simplest form’, and as such each dish uses no more than two key ingredients to highlight the provenance of the produce itself. At £120, the 15-course menu is generous, and despite the length is delivered at a rhythmic pace that ensures it never outstays its welcome. The menu begins with a series of snacks including house-cured meats such as Mangalitza belly; an ephemeral beetroot, duck liver and tea macaron; poached oyster and pea with lovage granita; and Welsh wagyu Bellini with Exmoor caviar. Later dishes include poached cod with preserved Wiltshire truffle; duck with berries; and a Hackney honey and lavender dessert. A shorter six course menu is available at lunchtimes during the week. The meal is divided into two stages, both of which begin with a ceramic cup of warming broth - the first made with beef bones and the second an umami-rich mullet broth that really gets the tastebuds going.
The drink: An optional wine pairing is available for diners, with bottles hand selected by Wasserman. The curated selection focuses on low intervention wines from both well-renowned domains such as Anne & Jean-Francois Ganevat in the Jura, and lesser-known artisanal producers such as Will Davenport in East Sussex.
The vibe: The vast, cavernous space is split between and warm and inviting bar area, and a smart, spacious dining room featuring hand-carved tables made with wood from fallen London Plane trees. An open, wood-fired kitchen connects the two. Taking inspiration from the natural materials used to create nearby of St Bartholomew-the-Great church, Restaurant St. Barts uses raw materials including stone, wood and linen to ‘bring a feeling of the old Smithfield to the new’. A 10 ft stone-topped bar dominates the entrance to the restaurant with lime wash plaster walls, exposed brick and natural stone flooring. Diners are given the chance to experience both areas as part of the restaurant experience, beginning in the bar for the snacks part of the menu before moving into the restaurant for the main dishes.
And another thing: Restaurant St. Barts’s main dining room overlooks the cloisters of St Bartholomew-the-Great church, making for quite an edifying dining experience.
