Look, let’s not get into the specifics of how I ended up in a Clapham chain pub on a recent windblown Thursday.
Let’s not, if you don’t mind, fully examine the mostly benign proclivities (Premier League football, draught Guinness) that nudged me and a similarly afflicted mate towards the infernal heart of the big O’Neill’s by the Tube station. But, let me just say: if you were to imagine all the stereotypically unkind things one might hear about the cultural landscape of Clapham — the older man brutalising Mustang Sally on the karaoke machine; the unbussed tables of half-eaten nachos; the innumerable, White Claw-chugging Australians in muscle vests — then you’d have seen them physicalised in screaming, half-cut Technicolor on that night.
I do not say this to do that restaurant critic thing of lazily disparaging an unfairly maligned dining neighbourhood. Clapham, despite basically being Brixton in Adidas Sambas, does contain some unheralded gastronomic multitudes (not to mention the terrific likes of Ploussard and Sorella).
It is more that encountering this particular tableau, just a few minutes after a glorious meal at Crispin at Studio Voltaire, sharpened my appreciation for the deft conjuring trick we had just experienced. This latest expansion of the Crispin brand would work almost anywhere; it cements founding restaurateur Dom Hamdy’s HAM group as one of the capital’s most nimble and influential young hospitality operations. Yet to sit there at the moment, in an elegant, candlelit life raft amid an unforgiving sea of identikit brunch spots and Simmons bars, is to feel you are in the presence of something quietly seismic and subtly miraculous.
This is doubly impressive given the site. Tucked down a tranquil side street, Studio Voltaire is an enjoyably provocative gallery and arts organisation that had a first crack at an in-house restaurant with the 2022 launch of the faintly Antipodean Juliet’s. It was a furiously creative endeavour that I enjoyed enormously.
However, if local mutterings are to be believed, its daytime focus made it a harder sell in an area lousy with avo toast options but notably short on serious evening spots.
Fresh from the success of Shoreditch’s Bistro Freddie, Hamdy and his team’s response to this conundrum has been to emphasise dinner service and bring some artful concealment to the 50-cover, somewhat rattly shell of a lobby space. Candles flicker; heavy curtains and moveable, scuffed metal units gird the permanently heaving room’s chic, bentwood bistro chairs; sculptural light fixtures are like possessed wimples in flight.
Founder Dom Hamdy has brought cool and swagger to an area that even locals decry as a culinary tundra
The requisite seasonal small plates, by head chef Michael Miles, perhaps play things with a straighter bat. Golden-fried, breaded mackerel lounged beside a zinging pool of tartare sauce; an oiled tangle of roasted leeks were similarly defibrillated by a twin hit of herbed yoghurt and salsa verde; Welsh rarebit, the apogee of blowtorched squidge and crunch, benefited from the lily-gilding exclamation point of fat, glimmering anchovies. Miles previously cooked contemporary Italian at Manteca but here — as clued by the staff’s oversize, St John-style chore jackets — he is channelling something of Fergus Henderson’s gutsy restraint, stark aesthetics and gleeful British revisionism.
This minimalist approach didn’t always totally work. Gorgeous line-caught cod, cooked to unearthly softness and moated by a shimmering velouté, gave way to a braised lamb dish that wanted for some depth of flavour. Similarly, chips, beside a sun-yellow splodge of aioli, had a perplexing lack of salt. Still, solace came quickly in the form of the uniformly excellent draught wines — especially a 2021 Beaujolais from organic producer Domaine St-Cyr — and a dense, nutty wodge of brown butter cake with rhubarb that was like school dinner handed an absurd glow-up.
It cemented the feeling that Hamdy and his team have done the unthinkable: brought cool, swagger and weapons-grade restaurant sexiness to an area that even locals are prone to decry as a culinary tundra. If you want two Jägerbombs for £7.50 and the chance to crucify Islands in the Stream on a Thursday night then I know just the place. If you want sanely priced, effortless dining glamour then, well, you need to visit the Crispin stable’s latest bit of artful empire-building.
