Grace Dent reviews Grain Store Unleashed

Grace Dent vegges out at Clerkenwell's Grain Store Unleashed
Veg fantasy: Grain Store Unleashed at The Zetter Hotel (photo: Addie Chinn)
Grace Dent22 April 2015

I’ve never been one to underestimate the culinary prowess of vegetables. As any sane person knows, the very best part of hosting Sunday lunch is when the vile masses have buggered off, leaving you alone with Countryfile on BBC One, a massive glass of Chianti and all the leftover roast potatoes. Or a bowl of sautéed green beans. Or my Brussels sprout recipe, which contains so many lardons, Gruyère and cream one need never know pesky vitamins or fibre have troubled one’s mouth.

Therefore, concepts like Bruno Loubet’s Grain Store Unleashed at The Zetter — where vegetables are the star of the show and the mood is adventurous — excite me. I was a vegetarian for seven years in the 1990s, back when meat-free dining-out options — wherever you ate — consisted of an identikit microwaved lasagne served with some depressed iceberg leaves, drenched in catering-supply vinaigrette that tasted of citrus Toilet Duck.

Of course, things have moved on a bit since; still, I’ve yet to see restaurants here butter up vegetarians or veg-lovers like they do in America. At one of my favourite resting spots, Girl & the Goat in Chicago, the starters include pan-fried shishito peppers in miso, wood-grilled broccoli with Rogue Smokey Blue cheese, and green garlic pierogi with rhubarb chimichurri. I dream constantly of the Bibb & beets or kale ribollita at The Little Owl in Greenwich Village. Meanwhile, in London, we’re supposed to do rapturous back flips if the chef has shoved some truffle oil on the pomme purée.

Grain Store Unleashed is the sister restaurant of Grain Store, King’s Cross, but it’s a more experimental, edgier version and only here for a limited period. The night I went the room was thoroughly hectic, which took me aback as the concept, even to a five-a-day obsessive, might still seem a bit woolly. Here is a ‘vegetable restaurant’ that isn’t really for vegetarians. The menu contains wood pigeon, wild sea trout and meat-based stocks (which can be removed). Was there a market for weirdos like me who eat steak, but get het up over kohlrabi and broad bean ravioli? Yes. Turns out there are tons of us.

Unleased: "The food, I cannot lie: it was very experimental"

Starting with a flute of champagne with butter and hay liqueur, my companion and I whisked through eight courses. Service is joyous, swift and charming. The food, I cannot lie: it was very experimental. A vegetal oyster appeared, in a borrowed shell, with caviar and a black, dehydrated and salty cracker representing ‘the bottom of the sea’. This was followed by two spears of heavenly asparagus in brown butter with pomelo and bronze fennel. If they’d brought another 40 of these and left the bottle of champagne, I’d have been content.

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Next up, pickled flowers with some segments of tart rhubarb, a puddle of green apple sauce and some wild sea trout. At this point, I began imagining bringing my parents here and became quite giddy: ‘Yes, the rhubarb does go with the trout and the flowers. This is how we do fish in London. Eat up!’

The kohlrabi and broad bean ravioli was a plate of marvellous, buttery beans with two al dente slivers of kohlrabi representing pasta. Then a singular Charlotte potato was unveiled with some wholly wondrous spring cabbage roasted with bay leaf and caraway seeds and a wobbly, tepid poached egg. It is difficult to say that these dishes stood alone without a humble pork chop to perk them up.

And let history record that the course involving red vegetables, spiced bread sauce, salted lemon purée, wood pigeon and chilli chocolate was possibly one of the most extraordinary combinations of warring foodstuffs on one plate that London has ever witnessed.

Still, I salute Loubet for his courage, his strength and indefatigability. It is not every day a woman is offered a pudding made from parsnips and white chocolate, but this was that day, I was that woman. We left, £160 down, and completely full of beans.

Grain Store Unleashed at The Zetter Hotel

86-88 Clerkenwell Road, EC1 (020 7324 4455; grainstoreunleashed.com)

1 Green Martini £8.50

1 Butter & Hay champagne £9.50

2 eight-course menus £78

1 bottle Chablis 1er Cru £43

1 bottle still water £3.50

2 Americano £5.40

Service £18.49

TOTAL £166.39

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