Dizzyingly impressive: this new venture delivers studious, high-level technique without any of the attendant faff
(Picture: Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures Ltd)“A wine bar???” This was a mate’s WhatsApped response — trailed a moment later by a GIF of Del Boy and Trigger cradling their red wine spritzers in that deathless Only Fools and Horses scene — to the pre-visit details I shared about this week’s restaurant. And, well, putting the cheek (and dwindling gratitude at a free meal) among my friends to one side for a moment, it was a reminder of the problems some people still have with that phrase. Wine bar. Even now, for some the sound of it carries the Brut aftershave-splashed scent of a very specific sort of provincial, Eighties naffness.
But of course, if you know your restaurants, then you will have noticed that, especially in recent years, the wine bar has been revolutionised and rehabilitated. Up in De Beauvoir, Hector’s is winning fans with its artful spreads of tinned seafood, serrano ham-piled crisps and frosted bottles of grower champagne. In Soho, Bar Crispin adds oysters and fried chicken to the mix. And now, pivotally I feel, here is Fitzrovia’s Carousel Wine Bar: a first permanent operation for the team behind the acclaimed, revolving-door restaurant that brings neighbourhood warmth, stealthy ambition and a certain youthful swagger to a part of town not readily associated with those things.
Of course, the headline here is the fancy new home that Ollie and Ed Templeton, who founded Carousel and hosted more than 300 guest chef residencies during a seven-year tenure at their former site in Marylebone, have migrated to. Set a few doors down from the Charlotte Street Hotel and crisply accented with stone and pine and splashes of brilliant white, the entire complex sprawls across three connected Georgian townhouses, encompassing a main guest restaurant in the rear, an upstairs workshop, a more casual, counter-focused “incubator” operation (currently inhabited by the very popular Goila Butter Chicken) and the terrazzo-floored modernist wine bar space, where the funk tunes are almost as loud as chef Ollie Templeton’s flavours. Housemade crisps, trickled with a kind of preserved tomato salsa and strewn with shreds of anchovy, brought to mind English nachos while a brittle, deep-fried boat of sweet and sour onion cracker held an outrageous, spurting payload of whipped Cora Linn cheese.
Carousel’s founders have clearly absorbed plenty from the international rock star class of chefs that have breezed through their doors. But what’s so pleasing about the food — whether it is gnarled fried chicken anointed with gherkin, honey and habanero or a fantastically deranged, textural scrum of mash, grilled pink firs and golden-fried straw potatoes, brightened by empirical hot sauce and pickled onion slivers — is that you get studious, high-level technique without any of the attendant faff, oppressive seriousness or interminable gastronomic tantra that occasionally accompanies a tasting menu.
Ultimately, these are full-throated hymns to the glory and scope of global drinking food. And if you are availing yourself of one of the bottles on the shelves that line the space, then I would nudge you towards Alsatian producer Moritz-Prado’s beautifully refined riesling. Could you say that those who just want a rounded, three-course dinner might struggle with the supercharged canapé approach? Or that some of the larger dishes — especially pork neck, cooked very rare — aren’t quite as engaging? Perhaps you could.
But I would note that one boon of the relative lightness of a meal here is this: it leaves more room for a climactic, sugar-dusted triangle of fried apple pie. Hot, cinnamon-warmed, nuzzled beside lemon thyme caramel ice cream and — yes, all right — vaguely redolent of burning the roof of your mouth in a suburban McDonald’s, it is a dish that encapsulates this little Fitzrovian marvel’s irreverent, intensely considered approach. It should be noted that my wine bar-phobic mate ate every last scrap (and his words). The Templetons’ new, fixed space may not twirl with the same attention-grabbing sense of renewal as the other parts of Carousel. But, in its own small, profound way, this wine bar with a difference, is a dizzyingly impressive achievement.
