Pearly Queen, a newish seafood restaurant in east London, refers to the majesty of oysters, though there will be readers, older ones especially, who associate the phrase with those pearly queens (and kings) in suits and dresses festooned with mother-of-pearl buttons. They were always on the telly back in the 1970s, on shows such as That’s Life! and The Good Old Days, belting out Knees up Mother Brown and offering a route back to a golden time when all of London loved jellied eels and the pavements were clogged with folk doing the Lambeth Walk. Pearly Queen, the restaurant, instead takes a regal attitude to the likes of Carlingford Lough and Gallagher Atlantics, and serves them with scotch bonnet hot sauce and lime. It also serves crisp buffalo oysters, which involve dredging Carlingford number twos in panko breadcrumbs, deep-frying them at 190C, then drizzling them with a sauce made with sriracha and clarified butter, and finishing the whole, crisp, jammy, hot, salty mess with ranch dressing.
Pearly Queen isn’t slap-bang in the middle of Shoreditch’s head-thumping epicentre, but is instead, and rather wisely, down the quieter end, between Aldgate and Spitalfields, and opposite the fantastic pulled noodle spot Xian Biang Biang Noodles and the ever-reliable Sunday lunch spot The Culpeper. Just like chef Tom Brown’s first solo restaurant, Cornerstone, his new place isn’t terribly formal, even if the food is certainly serious. There are no strings of pearls or cummerbunds required, but you’ll definitely need the capacity to eat Cornish brill poached in squid stock and butter, with a potato velouté and white asparagus and dotted with squid ink, or cuttlefish lasagne topped with a 36-month aged parmesan-enriched bechamel.
Brown’s head chef here is Patrick Maher, ex of Orwell Road in Dublin and the Peligoni Club in Zakynthos, Greece, and his team dish up painstakingly thought-over creations, from the very first hunk of sourdough with seaweed butter to the deftly chopped chalk stream trout tartare topped with an egg yolk. More nouvelle dishes include crab meat transformed into the world’s most decadent ball of arancini with an oozing, buttery centre, much like a chicken kiev, and mash with Guinness and oyster gravy, in which the slightly bitter, black jus dances enticingly around silky pommes puree.
There is two Michelin star-level ingenuity going on here, even when they’re only slinging oysters in the deep-fat fryer or doling out bread. Yes, you could just stick to oysters and cocktails and have a lovely time, but you could also try the oyster paté, which is piped back into its shell and topped with champagne jelly and purslane. Put simply, there will be things at Pearly Queen, as at Cornerstone, that you will never have eaten elsewhere, though that’s not to say you won’t do in future, once other people shamelessly rip them off.
On a Friday lunchtime in early spring, the room was sedate, but the playlist was a nonstop cavalcade of post-punk and 80s indie: PiL, Gang of Four, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Cure … Thank God we’re seeing the back of restaurants parping out Kenny G-lite, when they could instead be playing Psycho Killer by Talking Heads or whipping me into a melancholic haze with The Headmaster Ritual by the Smiths. I drank only fizzy water, because I am a saint, but the cocktail list is curated by Max Venning of Three Sheets in Dalston and features pearly martinis laced with picpoul and a pearl onion or bucks fizz made with clementine, fig leaf and almond. They also sell Hattingley Valley sparkling by the glass and, if you’re booze-free and want to feel grown up, they will make you a non-alcoholic seaside soda with Everleaf Marine, salt cordial and tonic.
My enduring memories of Pearly Queen revolve around two things in particular: a monkfish tail in a rich XO sauce that is patently deepened with shellfish, and a dessert of warm gingerbread and Cashel Blue cheese – another novel combination that makes so much sense now that I’ve thought about it. They’ve also been known to offer desserts featuring a gold goblet filled with custard ice-cream, forced rhubarb and ginger biscuit crumbs, and positively wicked warm sticky toffee madeleines covered in butterscotch sauce and thick cream.
Pearly Queen is not cheap, because nowhere lovely is these days, but it is a paean to fine British ingredients, and to splurging on butter and decadent dining. Sure, if you were to try to swim the Channel after eating at this fishy establishment, you’d sink to the bottom very quickly, weighed down with paté, cream and panko crumbs – but what a way to go.
Pearly Queen 44 Commercial Street, London E1, 020-8161 0399. Open lunch Tues-Sat, noon-3pm, dinner Mon-Sat, 6-10pm. From about £55 a head à la carte, plus drinks and service
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