A handsome new space for St John, thrumming with life
(Picture: Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures Ltd)Good menu-writing is a dance and a tease; a playful back-and-forth where crucial dish information is both generously disclosed and tantalisingly withheld. At its most successful, it is that moment of pleasant surprise and awed happiness at a restaurant table. But then, at its worst, it can lead to frustration and lurching bewilderment.
I thought of all this as I sat amid the happy, wine-loosened clamour of St John in Marylebone; the venerated British nose-to-tail restaurant’s newest outpost (a first proper opening in seven years) and a place where the steps of this old dance can be masterful, comforting and, perhaps, every now and then, a little bamboozling.
To be clear: St John Marylebone is still, fundamentally, a hugely appealing endeavour. Original founders Fergus Henderson and Trevor Gulliver (with chef director Jonathan Woolway and head chef Fintan Sharp) have succeeded in condensing the pleasure-forward irreverence and unfussy conviviality of St John’s other sites into a handsome new space, already thrumming with life. If you enjoy dialled-up, robustly modern British flavours, and like the sound of a gushing rarebit croquette or plump roast cod striped with a wincing green sauce, then you will have fun here. But I did find, across two separate lunchtime visits, that some of the daily-changing blackboard menu’s eccentricities around dish price, size and construction proved an occasional, nagging obstacle.
Still, there really is lots of fun to be had, so let us start with that. Nestled in the ground-floor walk-in space amid the trademark whitewashed walls and peg coat hooks (there is a roomier, more formal dining room in the basement), we kicked off with skate, little gem and aioli: two, crunching little lettuce boats of chopped fish, suspended in the sort of enlivening garlicky mayo where you can almost see the wiggly cartoon stink lines emanating from your mouth. A creamy anchovy sauce, cloaking calves’ liver and radish, had similar, no-holds-barred vigour. And then there was the deep-fried welsh rarebit: an audacious, rambunctious reinvention that turns St John’s signature “savoury” into a puffy, bronzed fritter of spurting, mustardy cheese.
Sharp, who is a young chef leading what looks to be a young kitchen team, is clearly working within established Hendersonian parameters, while also trying to embrace the same counterintuitive spirit that turned a roasted length of bone, some toast and a clump of chopped parsley into arguably one of the most iconic dishes of the past quarter century. But some of the more challenging moments seemed to arise from this free-form approach. Tunworth and pink fir, for instance, brought two split halves of a single fried potato, a wodge of cheese and a length of chopped spring onion that somehow cost £12.50. It felt luxurious but incomplete; a chef’s post-shift fridge-raid made up of scant leftovers.
I’m confident this sparky addition to the St John famil can step into its own dazzling new light
That it is the only thing on the very concise, 12-item menu approximating a traditional side (contrasting the largesse of Smithfield or St John Bread & Wine’s chips and anchovy toasts and simple side salads) is perhaps part of the broader issue. St John Marylebone — as evidenced by the snug proportions, the pastry-heaped zinc counter, and the focus on a wine list filled out by bottles from the restaurant’s own French vineyards — models itself on the bars of Paris and Florence. Yet the St John formula, generally thought of as substantial rather than snacky, probably needs to evolve a bit more to fit that particular frame.
I don’t doubt that it can happen (or that perhaps some of the kinks of a pricing approach that has a tendency to mount up dramatically can be ironed out). In the meantime, I am inclined to focus on the abundant positives. At the end of that first visit I finished a magnificently brooding bitter chocolate cream, ordered half a dozen warm madeleines to go, and walked away, confident that this sparky addition to the St John family can, eventually, step out of the shadow of its forebears and into its own dazzling new light.
