The Clove Club - restaurant review

Skilfully executed cooking in generous portions and served with aplomb, this is cuisine du blogeur — you feel experimented upon more than fed
1/2
David Sexton9 October 2014

Here we have one of the hottest openings of the year so far, for the food-bloggers and hipsters anyway.

Chef Isaac McHale of the Young Turks collective, most recently cooking at the Ten Bells, and frontmen Danny Willis and Johnny Smith, who ran a private dining club in Dalston under this name, have moved up into Shoreditch Central — two large ground-floor rooms in the Grade II-listed Shoreditch Town Hall, originally built in 1865 and last extended in 1903, now managed by a trust, bringing it back to life as a centre for the arts.

The project has been crowd-sourced and has been highly anticipated — east London, says McHale, has a lot of energy right now and it’s “the Williamsburg of London” — ie the very centre of hipster incubation.

The dining room itself, seating 40, is unexpectedly severe. There’s a completely open kitchen with eight or so guys, all beardy with hipster crops, in gorgeous blue-and-white striped aprons, beavering away. But the enormously high municipal ceilings create quite a sterile atmosphere, not helped by shadeless lighting from bulkhead lamps halfway up the walls, supplemented only by candles on the tables. There’s a wooden floor, tables of reclaimed planks in iron frames, bentwood chairs, and no decoration.

The menu is equally uncompromising. For £47, you simply get what they give you — three little starters to share, followed by six more tasting-sized dishes. It’s oddly relaxing, having no choice — it takes the responsibility away from you and gives it all to the chef, deciding for you not how each dish should be but the structure of the whole meal. McHale — originally from Glasgow, who has worked at the Ledbury and Noma — has said the format allows him “to do some interesting dishes that people might not order from an à la carte”. I’ll say.

The three opening snacks were four little slices of unremarkable smoked duck ham; two curious mock-spring rolls made of blanched, thin-sliced kohlrabi, containing a paste of roasted sunflower seeds (tasting oddly peanutty), perked up with some mint; and some fresh, well-scrubbed radishes, served with the leaves on, which we were rightly encouraged to eat too, sprinkled with toasted and crushed sesame seeds, alongside a dipping pool of rosy-pink mayonnaise, flavoured with the fermented Korean condiment gochujang, made from chilli, rice and soybean, giving a mild heat. All quite busy, all quite novel, without being food one would hasten to order again.

“Warm fennel, walnut & seaweed” was large slices of very mild, indeed almost flavourless, softened fennel, served warm, draped with some salty, slippery dulse, accompanied by a big dollop of cold crème fraîche and some chopped walnuts — a dish more about contrasting textures and temperatures than tastes, like others that followed. We didn’t quite finish this lot: with this kind of cooking, once you have got the effect intended, there seems no particular point in eating more.

“Leeks, smoked mussels and spinach” was one soft-poached leek, opened up down its length, topped with some juicy mussels, with a bright green, salty, smooth spinach purée on the side — a pleasant enough assemblage, rather than a big hit of flavours.

“Ruby red beef, ransom & potato” proved to be a kind of para-main course, steak and chips all gussied up — large chunks of rare but tender rib of beef, taken off the bone, dressed with chard leaves, served with a few potato chips refried hard enough to be croquettes, and some dots of green and vividly garlicky mayonnaise. Comparatively straightforward meat and veg, then — but we didn’t quite get through this either.

“Warm cider and ginger mousse”, served over some stewed apple in a little bowl, was fizzy, sour and harshly gingery — perhaps meant as a palate cleanser but not a pleasing taste at all. By now, we had had mousses enough, we were all mousse’d-out.

“Blood orange, sheep’s milk mousse & wild fennel” was a twisted cheese course with a cold mousse, contrasting with warm spiced blood orange segments and some curls of jellied red orange juice, topped with crunchy ewe’s milk cheese dried into a lacy tuile, again a study in unexpected temperatures and textures, rather than offering any sort of truth to ingredients. Finally, a “chicory tea cake” was one of those chocolate-covered little circles, the mousse flavoured perhaps with quaint old Camp, rather than coffee proper.

For the money, this is an awful lot of cooking, skilfully executed, in generous portions, served with aplomb and friendly curiosity about what we thought of it all, at least until it was noticed we were not finishing many dishes. It may be a bit harsh to judge a restaurant on its opening night but there was no hesitancy in the execution here. It just seemed that this menu had been devised to show off the chef’s innovation, rather than to please the eater — we felt experimented upon more than fed. For many, that’s just what they want, for this is cuisine du blogeur, a new style of cooking, which, if it is regional at all, can be best attributed to certain key streets of Shoreditch, plus, of course, a yearningly aspirational diaspora. Certainly, on Monday night, the bloggers seemed enthralled. Strange that just as Danny and Johnny, working the room, looked alike, so too did many of the diners seem clones of one another. But that’s fashion.

Shoreditch Town Hall, 380 Old Street, EC1 (020 7729 6496). Mon-Sat 6-10pm. Currently dinner only; lunch service from March 19. About £140 for two, including wine. thecloveclub.com.

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in

MORE ABOUT