Review at a glance: ★★★★☆
A bleak mist shrouds the restaurant business. Not the ghost of Rachel Reeves — still very much alive; you may have spotted her at a Sabrina Carpenter concert recently — but certainly her essence. The Chancellor’s thuggish budget is playing hell with hospitality, forcing job cuts and closures. The future is neither bright nor orange: it is the brown of an envelope containing final demands.
Opening a new place, then? Received wisdom suggests the only types going for it at the minute are either in too deep to stop or money laundering. I rather like a cash-wash restaurant, as it happens. There’s usually a cellar full of top wine at knock-down prices, caviar on the house, and lovely loos full of marble and flat surfaces. Say what you will but the morally bankrupt are never cheap.
Câv seems unlikely to be a money laundry, and not only because owners Chris Tanner and Edwin Frost are hardly the type. This is an operation that appears to be financed by gumption alone. Tables have been inherited from the previous occupant of their railway arch home, the lighting is moot, as though someone is fearful of the leccy bill, and the walls, now dark stained wood, have no art, not even a poster. It’s as if someone opened The Dover in their garage, using pocket money.
But Frost and Tanner deserve applause for giving it a go in the most uncertain of circs, and their business plan tickles me. After leasing the space, their next move was to invite chefs to take up residence, which to an outsider looks an awful lot like moving in and then getting someone else to do all the hard work. Still, already they have found a willing crowd, twentysomethings in the Bethnal Green mould: lots of chore jackets and stuff from the Service Works sale. Also — though this might have just been the Sunday crowd — an unexpected proliferation of snoods.
In residence now is Tasca, from chef Josh Dallaway and sommelier Sinéad Murdoch. Both are a warm, unceremonious presence. Tasca is Spanish and Portuguese, embracing the heavy French influence found in Lisbon. A jambon-beurre gilda is a clever thing, despite butter on a cocktail stick not usually being a promising prospect. Here it is rolled in a wrap of salt-speckled ham, speared alongside a caper berry and guindilla. In one bite is the soft comfort of butter and the sour tang of the pepper, the sort of thing belonging to holidays of dry heat and small beers. Alongside it is Wigmore, a sheep’s milk cheese soft at the best of times, heated till it collapses over the bread, dangling into the pool of honey beneath it. We contentedly scoop it together. “Mind you,” says Twiggy. “It’s hard to mess up cheese on toast.”
The bilbaína sauce is a dark, amber thing — I half imagine I can hear it growling
Brixham crab has its shredded meat whisked together with butter and, Murdoch says, 10 types of peppercorn. I suspect a couple would have done it. But it means there is sweet and spice together, something seen again when a six-sided tartlet arrives built from a dollop of ricotta mustia with fresh pear throughout, the pear’s sweetness flickering through the smoky, hazy flavoured cheese. Contrast and balance whisper directions to Dallaway.
Scallops in their shells have been doused in bilbaína sauce, which in the Basque Country more readily goes with hake, bass or cod. It offers a bitter press of burnt garlic and chilli heat. A dark, amber thing, I half imagine I can hear it growling. Vaguely threatening too is the black pudding, made to the Christian Parra recipe. It is famous by black pudding standards, which is not very famous at all. But chefs revere it: light on blood, its distinct flavour comes from the addition of Piment d’Espelette, the red pepper. Wisely, Dallaway leaves it alone, sitting it on onions sweated in Marsala. It is sticky and rich, and finds a foil in the bitter nuttiness of chicory.
What else? Razor clam rice, as good as you expect. And an uncommon, aged vinho verde from Casa de Mouraz, is marked up barely at all: what sells for £25 in the shop is £39 here. Elsewhere it might be £100. And so we leave the cool crowd, pleased with the beautiful food and fair prices. Câv is draughty, needs laying out properly, and could do with a few prints somewhere. But gumption has gone a long a way. There is a bleak mist about. But in Tasca, Câv has found its guiding light.
Tasca at Câv 255 Paradise Row, E2 . Meal for two about £120; cav255.london
