Tavern has a lot going for it. There’s the marvellously warren-like dining room with airy, high ceilings, crisp clapperboard walls and stunning Victorian floor tiles that were already in place back when Tavern was Nest. Nest was a British restaurant with a reasonably priced tasting menu and a fixation on foraging. It was good, really good, but punters aren’t really doing tasting menus anymore, or at least they weren’t at Nest, so a fresh approach was needed.
Better still is a juicy pork and cuttlefish sausage
A swift revamp and Tavern has appeared in Nest’s place. It’s still run by the same team (who are also behind the excellent Restaurant St Barts), but with the new name comes new branding, a stylistic revamp which suggests a kind of hard-edged, Dark Ages whimsy. The font that bears the restaurant’s name is aggressively gothic, their online presence is replete with chubby lairds drinking from bladders of mead, ragged sheepskins are casually tossed about the place and pewter tankards are used for serving shards of puffed pig skin to dip in a filthy little pot of moodily smoked cod’s roe. But this is where the medieval comparison ends, with Tavern’s menu less feudal chic and more contemporary global fusion with a side order of quirk.
The best dishes at Tavern are impeccable. The ‘chunion puff’ is a tennis ball sized offering of choux pastry stuffed with creamy confit onion and cheesy custard before being showered in fluffy parmesan snow. It is a divine and decadent delight. Fire-cooked bread is a touch claggy, but the flavour of the tomato and miso house butter drizzled over the top cannot be argued with. Better still is a juicy pork and cuttlefish sausage. The menu says it’s served with mustard, but it comes with a deliciously dank chutney and flurry of sauerkraut instead. Not that we’re arguing, it is incredible, beautifully burnished and maintaining its all-important sausage skin snap. Bury me with a dozen.
Less good is a salad of far too many French beans, BBQ peach and ricotta. It’s quite hard to find the stated ricotta (maybe that’s it smeared at the bottom of the dish?) and the fruit has been over-pickled to the point of aggressive piquancy. A mushroom main with roasted yeast and barley also suffers from the same over-astringent quality, and though a dessert of strawberry sorbet sings with the perfect sweet/tart balance, Tavern’s mini brown butter cakes are tough as old boots.
This Tavern may not be full of mead-quaffing brigands and grubby wizards, but there’s lots to like about the place, and with a few tweaks, they could be well on their way to the Age of Enlightenment.
The vibe A British bistro on busy Old Street.
The food Global flavours funneled through British ingredients.
The drink Great wines by the glass and pickleback martinis, which aren’t just dirty, but utterly filthy.
Time Out tip You simply must order the cheese and onion ‘chunion’ puffs and that incredible pork and cuttlefish sausage.