Approaching The Compton Arms in Islington — a place that I last visited for a review four years, a royal succession and approximately 17 Tory leadership campaigns ago — it looked, initially, like not much had changed. Here was the old, off-white building and the clamour of late spring’s first pavement drinkers; here were the flat-screen TVs, cosy, low-beamed anterooms and youthful, nose-ringed bar staff; and here, inevitably, was a man in the corner loudly explaining to a half-interested date that George Orwell used to be a regular here.
In this case, however, outward stasis belies a period of quiet revolution. Having survived a 2022 attempt by Nimbyish neighbours to close it down, The Compton now has a 29-year-old, lavishly tattooed ex-ballerina called Esther Redfern-Ghaleb as its de facto landlady.
Those flat screens no longer show any televised sport (a bold move for an Arsenal stronghold that, for years, was practically an extended wing of The Emirates). And, perhaps most significantly, the residency programme that gave us the genre-defining Four Legs is now a showcase for Tiella: an all-new regional Italian kitchen from Kiwi ex-Sager + Wilde chef Dara Klein. Yes, this nascent concept may lack some of Four Legs’ full-throttle immediacy. But Klein’s food is understated, soulful and surprising; a fleet-footed array of snacks, salads and deep-cut pastas that look disarmingly thrown together but then proceed to knock you over with their comforting magnitudes of flavour and balance. Tiella, which is named after a Southern Italian seafood gratin, feels like a pivotal advancement. Not just for this sainted old boozer, but for a particular strain of idiosyncratic, new wave pub dining.
And it really does feel like the word may already be out about its subtle charms. Pushing through that roaring Thursday evening crowd of rumpled old boy regulars and Gorpcore young millennials, I found my pal, sitting at our reserved spot amid a frantic surrounding scramble for vacant tables and a ragtag, family trattoria atmosphere.
Italian-American-style Giardiniera provided an enjoyably unusual start: thick-cut cauliflower, carrots, pepper and celery in a sweet, piercing brine that was nicely offset by fatty slivers of cured sausage. Sage and anchovy fritti were decidedly hench, puffed hulls of golden-fried batter set in a nicely weighted aioli. Sheep’s ricotta with flame-griddled tropea onion, mint and an igniting drizzle of Calabrian chilli oil turned a handful of ingredients into something with a strange, thrumming magic.
Though Klein has only been cooking professionally for five years, it’s clear that she has natural ability, a deep Italian culinary education (helped by the fact her family ran a trattoria) and an intuitive feel for rustic, age-old combinations that feel novel in a restaurant context. She and her kitchen are not afraid to, for instance, serve a defiantly beige beef shin tagliatelle of unfathomable depth and pointed simplicity. Or, for that matter, ciceri e tria: an inexplicably scintillating chickpea pasta dish, laced with more chilli and crowned with strips of deep-fried dough.
The rugged simplicity didn’t always work. A preponderance of carbs on the very short menu can leave you feeling both uncomfortably stuffed and not exactly overwhelmed by options. Plus, the meatball and scamorza bun, though impressively messy, sorely lacked seasoning and flavour complexity. Still, as we polished off a glossy half-mound of diverting bay leaf panna cotta with Fernet-Branca, drained our beers, and made our way out past a pavement crowd that seemed to have at least doubled, the entire experience was very much in credit. Tiella slings a deeply likeable, kind of punk rock Pugliese out of the back room of a 19th-century pub; it subtly but radically expands our understanding of what is possible in these spaces and who they can be run by. Orwell — who famously used The Compton Arms as his partial inspiration for a fictional pub utopia called The Moon Under Water — would probably not have known what to make of it. But that, of course, is what makes it so brilliant.
The Compton Arms, 4 Compton Avenue, N1 2XD; Meal for two plus drinks around £100. Open Wednesday to Friday from 6pm to 10pm, Saturday from 1pm to 10pm (kitchen closed between 4pm-6pm) and Sunday from 12pm to 4.30pm; comptonarms.co.uk
