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I’ve always been fascinated by late ’60s brutalist complex the Brunswick Centre, which looms in the middle of Georgian Bloomsbury like a hellraising teenager’s drone that's crash-landed into a genteel little picnic. For decades it mouldered, unloved by all but a few architecture nerds. Now it’s had the kind of inevitable glow-up that few central London spots have escaped and Riding House Café’s newly launched second site sits beautifully within its spruced-up concrete ramparts.
Ignore the name: this is very much a brasserie not a café, serving up an all-day menu of seriously delicious dishes in a surprisingly welcoming space. Its designers have resisted the temptation to lean into the brutalist setting: instead, manor-house-style wood panelling and comfy leather-padded chairs sit below the exposed metal pipes on the ceiling. Weirdly, it works.
The menu gave me a temporary flutter of panic: the food is divided into ‘small’, ‘bowls’, ‘skewers’, ‘plates’ and ‘sides’. Send help! I guess this is just the post-small-plates landscape we live in but it does make ordering a challenge. Still, I ended up feeling smug with the food we got, which is a relief, because I was moments away from stabbing my fork into the menu at random.
First up, a warm artichoke dip, the kind of culinary Americana I am generally a bit sceptical of, but immediately fell in love with: it came thickly crusted with toasted cheese, oozy and unctuous underneath, ready to be slathered over charred sourdough. Another US import, the truffle mac ’n’ cheese, had a surprising and welcome lightness. I’ve got a bit of a soft spot for claggy, overcooked pasta glued together with cheddar but this version was definitely classier: the macaroni came veiled in a light cheese sauce and topped with a crisp layer of shallots and capers, with just the gentlest whiff of the promised truffle.
Other dishes had a lightly worn Japanese influence, like the aged beef and comté yakitori skewers, or the whole miso-grilled sea bass, which was a blackened triumph: the flesh fragrant and scented with fresh herbs, with a pleasant tangle of pickled cucumber offering a refreshing contrast. There were even carrot ‘mochi’ on top of an orange-scented dish of puy lentils: they combined with ribbons of crispy carrot peel to make a plate of exciting textural contrasts.
Riding House Café’s menu might be a document with the brain-scrambling properties of an HMRC self-assessment form but this complexity also makes it, perversely, a flexible, accessible kind of place. You could equally pop in for a lunchtime bowl of chana dal with pickle and flatbread (£13.50), or splash out on a 980g sirloin steak (£55.80), or just introduce any dessert fiends you might know to the lavish hot fudge sundae with honeycomb (£8.50).
Over on the cocktail menu, there are ludicrously named concoctions like the Mankini Martini – but you know what, the quixotic minds behind this place have earned their bit of fun. It’s a welcome addition to the Brunswick Centre and yet another great reason to mooch around this always-intriguing corner of Bloomsbury.
The vibe An artfully designed all-day brasserie in Bloombury’s Brunswick Centre.
The food Small plates, big plates, skewers... anything goes but it’s all delicious.
The drink A Euro-centric wine list, fruity cocktails, and a choice of five draught beers.
Time Out tip It’s two minutes away from the Curzon Bloomsbury cinema: combine the two for a dreamy date night.