Jimi Famurewa reviews Flor: Dazzling spin-off hits the sweet spot between familiar and unexpected

1/6
Jimi Famurewa @jimfam15 August 2019

Ambience: 4/5

Food: 5/5

Very late on during lunch at Flor, an Anjou pigeon was set before us: talons still attached, skin roasted, breast and leg pieces splayed into a crucifix shape like the work of a particularly baroque avian serial killer. ‘It’s a bit Jurassic Park,’ said my mate Joe, suspiciously eyeing one of the heat-crisped claws. Mark, my other friend, firmly announced he wasn’t even going to try it. But then, as Joe and I dived in and started muttering indecently about the luscious intensity of the dark meat — the sour pop of scattered tayberries playing against the salt — he relented and had a bite. And another. And another. Until eventually the pair of them were nibbling every scrap off the bone and practically planning a renegade hunting trip in Trafalgar Square.

This is the power of Flor: James Lowe and John Ogier’s wildly hyped Borough Market spin-off of Lyle’s, the Michelin-starred Shoreditch restaurant. Its food — a parade of cheesy, puffed flatbreads, brimming salads and some succulent scarlet prawn heads that are already responsible for several terabytes of Instagram data — hits a sweet spot between the unexpected and the familiar. Between thoughtful, modern refinement and messy, chin-dripping joy.

Things got good very quickly. Led up a tight, spiral staircase (related: there is no dignified way to heft a folding bike up these), the three of us settled into the bright, bottle-stacked dining room and got going with sourdough as religious experience. Seriously. I barely bother mentioning good restaurant bread and butter these days but this stuff — squidgy as moist cake, with a fresh tang plus thick sheafs of chorizo-like wild boar ventricina — was just ridiculously impressive. As was the brackish uppercut of lardo-draped anchovy toast. And a pair of bubbled, oozy flatbreads (one covered in stretchy, truffled taleggio cheese and Breme onion; the other in vin jaune and garlicky palourde clams) were lively, tomato-less personal pizzas in all but name.

The interior at Flor

The hits kept coming. Burrata cosied up with torn hunks of bread, sharp, pink onions, datterini tomatoes and a liberal drenching of olive oil that brought it all to life. Hake brandade was gooey, oiled potato and assertively salted fish, neatly tempered by an acidic tangle of lightly pickled peppers. And then lamb ribs, beneath a carpet of pistachio-stirred salsa verde, had both ravishing, golden char and soft, fat-seeping succulence. Mark and Joe got the prawns and your mileage on them may depend on how you feel about both consuming raw shrimp — helped along, here, by a yuzu kosho citrus dressing — and slurping prized, pungent goo from their cooked dismembered heads.

Which brings us to the pigeon (that also came with a pair of storming little parfait-piped duck fat toasts) and the point at which I scratch around, with some difficulty, for some negatives. Perhaps the internet-famous, striped slab of tayberry, peach and lemon verbena ‘Neapolitan’ ice cream is probably more of a neat visual gag than a legitimately exciting pudding.

But then we finished, as you should, with the brown butter cakes: little, dimpled miracles of flooding, fudgy sweetness that tasted like the hollowed-out heart of the greatest sticky toffee pudding imaginable. Astonishing. And an encapsulation of how Flor’s lightly challenging, immensely skilled approach is underpinned by simple, human warmth. This may well be the least surprising restaurant success of the year. But that doesn’t make it any less dazzling.

Flor

1 Bread and butter £2

1 Wild boar ventricina £8

1 Anchovy toast £11

1 Prawns £18

1 Hake brandade £11

1 Burrata £9

1 Clam flatbread £9

1 Taleggio flatbread £13

1 Lamb rib £13

1 Pigeon £25

1 Brown butter cakes £5

1 ‘Neapolitan’ £7

1 Glass of Rabasco Cancelli Rosato £7

1 Rhubarb soda £4

2 Espressos £4.60

1 Americano £2.50

Total £149.10

1 Bedale Street, Borough, SE1 (020 3319 8144; florlondon.com)

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