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The Hedonist

Grain Store – Review

July 8, 2013 by Adrian Leave a Comment

Grain Store                            King’s Cross

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1-3 Stable Street, Granary Square, London N1C 4AB
020 7324 4466/www.grainstore.com
Grain Store

Grain Store

Chef Bruno Loubet has considerable form when it comes to London restaurants. Some of us are old enough to remember Bistrot Bruno, one of the forerunners of the contemporary Soho scene; and then there was the much larger brasserie L’Odeon on the site now occupied by Hawksmoor Air St. After an extended stay in Australia he returned to London just a couple of year’s ago garnering rave reviews for his Bistro Bruno Loubet which occupies a corner of the Zetter Hotel in Clerkenwell. He has now spread his wings to King’s Cross.
Grain Store is situated in Granary Square, London’s newest city square and one of the biggest in Europe. As the centerpiece of the new King’s Cross redevelopment it is a confident and striking piece of urban planning tying in the old-the canal and huge warehouse buildings with the soon-to-be-completed office spaces that are the present day economic driver for the area. There is a powerful white sawtooth motif that traverses the various structures pulling them together into a whole. The new University of the Arts, including Central St Martin’s art school, is situated in the Granary Complex, also home to restaurants Caravan and Grain Store, creating a vibrant mixed economy.
What is exciting about Loubet’s gastronomic intervention in this new zone is that he has taken the opportunity to completely reinvent himself. Up to now his history as chef and restaurateur has always been firmly in the French tradition. With Grain Store it’s as if he woke up one morning to find that he had morphed with Yotam Ottolenghi. The food is global with a strong middle eastern influence; there is a strong emphasis on vegetables and with a large outside area, guest chefs, and cocktails by top mixmeister Tony Conigliaro (see our review of 69 Colebrooke Row), it feels like a statement of intent in a thriving and fast-moving London restaurant scene.
Grain Store

Grain Store

The post-industrial interior with exposed piped and ducting honours its warehouse past and is artfully dressed with period elements such as a a bar in an old perambulator. But what about the food?
The charming ex-St John waitress offered us the 6 course Suprise menu (a very reasonable £40) which bizarrely enough is not on the menu, unlike the 5 course £35 version. We then had a long succession of sharing plates arrive with many more hits than misses that seemed to overshoot the promised 6 courses by some way-but we weren’t complaining…
I was drinking Butter and hay champagne, a blend of Toasted butter and hay liquor and champagne. I struggled to detect any additional butter or hay notes in my glass of fizz so this was a bit of a disappointment. Catherine chose a Tuberose Collins, a mix of Gin, fresh lemon, Tuberose infused syrup and soda water. The Tuberose is a white flowered plant in the agave family much used in perfumery that the Victorians forbade young women to smell as its scent was liable to bring on a spontaneous orgasm! Catherine found the drink refreshing but sadly it didn’t induce a When Harry met Sally moment….
Cocktails are priced at a very reasonable  £7.50.
Onion bread @ Grain Store

Onion bread @ Grain Store

Onion bread had a crispy crust and good texture and flavour. It came with a light and creamy  creme fraiche butter.
Crudités, cashew and yeast dip, olive soil.

Crudités, cashew and yeast dip, olive soil.

Crudités, cashew and yeast dip, olive soil. Fresh radishes came with a hummous-like cashew and yeast dip and the playful olive soil.

Potato and rye bread, seaweed butter, oyster and borage leaves-this dish was sensational. I’ve never had oyster leaves before and they tasted of oyster! This wasn’t a piece of Blumenthalesque trickery but a naturally occuring phenomenon. This northern leaf will be appearing on a lot of menus soon.

Mushroom croquettes @ Grain Srore

Mushroom croquettes @ Grain Srore

Mushroom croquettes were perfect examples of their kind., crispy on the outside, creamy and full of flavour on the inside.
Baked Beetroots,pickled onions, goat labneh (strained yoghourt) were delicious as was a Vegetable salad with Roquefort and borlotti beans. Annoyingly as the light grew darker in the restaurant my Iphone camera couldn’t cope so that was the end of my photos for this review…
By now I was drinking one of  ‘Tony’s Greco-Roman wines’-a selection of tumblers of wine (£6.50) with smoked or herbal infusions. Cassis and clove Cardinal was really a Kir with added clove (a Cardinal should really be a Kir made with red wine). A home made cassis and clove cordial was combined with Aligote, the second-grade Burgundian white traditionally used for Kir, creating a robust, spicy, fruity blend that easily stood up to the Vegetable merguez, aromatic vegetables and preserved lemon salad. The merguez sausage, served alongside a pod of peas grilled to open and a preserved lemon salad, was made with chickpeas and cumin and paprika, and it was great to taste those flavours in a non-meat dish.
Pumpkin ravioli was silky and light and a deconstructed Asparagus gazpacho with seared asparagus, green gazpacho sauce, rosemary and pink peppercorn Melba toast was a playful early summer take on a classic.
Our waitress was in a birthday mood (hers) and insisted I try another of the Greco-Roman tipples. This time I had the Roman smoked Paprika with white wine- a glass of Grenache Blanc aromatised with smoked paprika cordial. The smokiness of the paprika didn’t overwhelm the wine which again stood up to our next dishes; Buttermilk and caraway braised cauliflower, wood baked onions, devilled duck’s hearts featuring the meatiness of the very trendy duck heart and the vegetarian Corn and quinoa tamale which was maybe a trifle heavy going after the feast we had just consumed.
And then to dessert..
Spicy candied tomatoes goat’s milk pannacotta-the pannacotta wobbled deliciously with the goats milk flavour being delicate rather than too strong. It was the perfect foil for the tomatoes which were astonishingly sweet and juicy, almost cherry-like.
Strawberry and balsamic jam, Horseradish ice cream, nasturtium leaves. This was similar to a dish I had eaten a couple of weeks previously in Paris at Ze Kitchen Galerie with Wasabi ice-cream. But the horseradish flavour was too intense here and needed to be toned down.
I really like Grain Store. It’s an optimistic life-affirming sort of place that is looking forward, trying to create a new less meat-intensive style of eating. It has a great buzz and energy and will be much copied. Having the involvement of Tony Conigliaro brings an added level of creativity to the drinks list and the Greco-Roman wines are an intelligent and creative response to the food offer. Some critics have felt that the Surprise menu lacks coherence, but that is surely missing the point. It’s a global food feast not a formal exposition of an out-of-date classical paradigm. Go and enjoy it!

Grain Store on Urbanspoon

Square Meal

69 Colebrooke Row – Review

June 26, 2013 by Adrian 1 Comment

69 Colebrooke Row                        Islington

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69 Colebrooke Row, London N1 8AA
drinks@ 69colebrookerow.com
07540528593
Sunday to Wednesday 5pm – 12 midnight
Thursday 5pm – 1am
Friday & Saturday 5pm – 2am

69 Colebrooke Row

69 Colebrooke Row

69 Colebrooke Row, also known in a rather enigmatic gesture as The Bar with No Name, sits in an Islington backstreet in that liminal zone where the bobo outposts of Camden Passage and Islington Green merge with the more urban terrain of Essex Rd. The bar is the creation of Tony Conigliaro, the dark prince of London mixology. Looking like a refugee from an El Greco painting, Conigliaro cut his teeth bartending at joints like Isola and Shochu Lounge. He has developed radical new approaches to the art of mixology influenced as much by processes in contemporary molecular gastronomy and perfumery as by his background in art and fashion.

The bar has the feel of 1950s Milan with the welcome addition of a speakeasy piano in the corner. The space it occupies is small, verging on the cramped, and the upstairs is devoted to a lab where Conigliaro and his assistant develop new blends. The drinks menu takes you on a tour of imagined locations-Avignon, St James’ Gate, Terroir, Death in Venice and Orange Grove Fizz-and invites you to sit back and enjoy the ride at the very reasonable price of £9 per drink.

So how did the drinks stack up?
The 'Terroir' @ 69 Colebrooke Row

The ‘Terroir’ @ 69 Colebrooke Row

The ‘Terroir’ is described as ‘Distilled clay, flint and lichen served straight from the bottle.’ It is the taste of the land that gives each wine its individual character but without the grapes getting in the way!
IMG_2537
Served from a wine bottle with a spoof Spanish label, it drinks like a Martini and is built on a Vodka base with the addition of three secret elements. The taste characteristics reminded me of a Pouilly-Fume, the dry white wine from the Loire, the grapes for which are grown on a clay and flint soil.  Sugar is clearly present in a way that is almost non-sweet and there are vegetal and soil flavours coming through too. It’s a serious drink that plays with our perceptions and asks questions about how we receive flavour.
The ' Vampiro'  @ 69 Colebrooke Row

The ‘ Vampiro’ @ 69 Colebrooke Row

The ‘ Vampiro’ is a Tequila and Mezcal Bloody Mary, but this is a much subtler version than the blood-spattered smoked chilli crazed zombie version that I had recently at a Mexican restaurant-fun as it was in a Tarantinoesque way. It is more measured and insuates its way into your system like a certain Transylvanian count on a first date with a virgin.
The  'Avignon' @ 69 Colebrooke Row

The ‘Avignon’ @ 69 Colebrooke Row

The  ‘Avignon’ takes us back to the Middle Ages  when the papacy shifted to France. It  tastes of Frankincense and musty church pews and is a blend of Merlet Cognac, chamomile syrup and smoked frankincense.
The 'Death in Venice' @ 69 Colebrooke Row

The ‘Death in Venice’ @ 69 Colebrooke Row

The ‘Death in Venice’ is a Campari Spritz (Campari and Prosecco) with added Grapefruit bitters. The citrus taste of the bitters lingers long after the other flavours have died away-imagine Dirk Bogarde as composer von Aschenbach on the beach at the Venice Lido in Visconti’s elegiac movie, his makeup running in the sun as he sits, slowly dying and longing for the unobtainable boy…
Conigliaro is in some ways a Ferran Adria type  figure in the world of cocktails, unafraid to innovate and investigate, preparing drinks that are not in any way gimmicky but that are multi-layered and intriguing. He is spreading his wings, collaborating with chef Bruno Loubet in Clerkenwell at The Cocktail Lounge at The Zetter Townhouse hotel and at Loubet’s new King’s Cross hit Grain Store (see our review), but as with Adria you get the sense that he is changing our perception of what a cocktail can be. If you are interested in contemporary drinks culture you should check out 69 Colebrooke Row.

69 Colebrooke Row on Urbanspoon

Square Meal

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