That I got my very first tattoo at a pop-up parlour in Selfridges is both completely ridiculous and usefully revealing. Partly this applies to the sort of 18-year-old I was. Which is to say, one who wanted to embrace youthful recklessness (via an only moderately embarrassing, Beckhamesque crucifix between the shoulder blades) but one who also hoped a sheen of boujee respectability might lessen the inevitable hail of parental shouting.
Still, I suppose the bigger illustrative truth here is this: Selfridges has a long and distinguished history of trying the sorts of things you wouldn’t necessarily expect from a 114-year-old department store. 2018 saw the addition of a permanent skate bowl on the first floor. You can still head to the basement for a clairvoyance session with the Psychic Sisters. And now, just in time to offer sanity and sanctuary amid the shuffling hordes of Christmas shopping season, here is Jackson Boxer at The Corner: a louche long-term kitchen residency, wedged in between luxury womenswear concessions, from one of the capital’s most interesting culinary communicators.
It is a destination spot in the sense that I question just how many diners will genuinely stumble across it. Set on the second floor in a decade-old, blank slate restaurant unit (vegan concept Adesse was the most recent incumbent), it lies a prolonged traipse beyond the disorienting retail warren known as the Women’s Designer Galleries. Alluringly, it’s a light-drenched nook of curvaceous crescent moon booths, flecked marble surfaces and dominating, floor-to-ceiling windows that offer a sparkling IMAX vista out and over Oxford Street’s grand upper architecture and ever-flowing human river.
The first dishes only enhanced the view. Potato cake brought a compressed girder of warm, miraculously fine-crisped hash brown and an ambrosial piping of cod’s roe, cleverly startled by peppery kosho. Roasted delica squash came with a turmeric and peanut sauce that had the kind of outrageous moreishness that seems to seep into the very marrow of your bones.
But then, in and amongst all that, there was an earthy gathering of beetroot, Westcombe ricotta and Marmitey puffed rice grains that wanted for a sharp slash of brightness. The certifiably viral, £50 bowl of smoked butter and madagascan pepper taglioni, crowned by a mound of N25 caviar, felt like a jarring union of high luxury and determinedly plain asceticism; like Louboutins worn with discounted Decathlon hiking socks. And then came ‘warm’ madeleines that had lost much of their life and interest in not being especially warm or made-to-order.
By this point I hard started to look again at the menu – the katsu-style fried chicken sandwich; the grilled ribeye with mustard – and mourn the roads not taken; to worry that, maybe, we had simply not ordered correctly. But I’m experienced enough to know that this is the self-gaslighting that mostly occurs when the fault isn't yours. For all that Boxer is part of a bohemian food dynasty (grandson of food writer Arabella, brother of bar owner and fellow restaurateur Frank) and a prolific hospitality lifer who has worked in many styles, his most prominent output has matched eclecticism with contextual specificity. Brunswick House subverts the rackety, British classicism of its antique-strewn interior; Orasay celebrates native seafood through a fresh lens.
Yet, at The Corner, the concept is no more complex than an immensely talented (and, as he said in a 2022 interview, somewhat “overstretched”) chef working with and against an unlikely environment. Occasionally at this place, as you pick at cool, culturally ambiguous salady things to the strains of piped in, holly jolly Christmas tunes, this slight disjointedness feels unavoidable.
Still, we ended with the redemption of a second pudding: an exuberantly moist apple cake, warm with thrumming Nordic spice, and an anointing spill of sour cream and blackberry sauce. Here, again, was Boxer’s knack for deftly articulated pleasure and willingness to try things. In a restaurant year largely defined by retrenchment and safety, that last quality feels especially precious. Yes, there are times when the finer details at The Corner get a little fuzzy. But, as with the faded cross that adorns my back, I find I have a fondness for the pluck and intention, even if there are issues with the final execution.
