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Lower East Liquor Bar & Bistro

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Cuisine: American
£80-90 for two

26 Westferry Circus, E14 8RR

Nearest Tube: Canary Wharf

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Phone: 020 7536 2862

Open: Open Monday-Friday, 7am-10.30pm & Saturduy-Sunday, 10am-10.30pm

 

 

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Taste of New York gets lost at Lower East

 

Going with the flow: Lower East’s head chef Nick Cuadrado

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As you emerge from the Tube, Canary Wharf’s sheer scale is brutalising. It makes you feel insignificant, not exhilarated as some developments do. And it’s hard to orientate yourself here, there being no history behind these streets. This place has been conjured into being by money alone and expresses nothing else.

Only when you get a sight of the river, and can look back to the City, do you start to get a sense of where you are in London, which way you are facing.

As it happens, Lower East is on the very edge of Canary Wharf, as near to the shore as you can get, on the Lower Riverside level, below Westferry Circus, hard by Canary Wharf Pier, where the river broadens to loop round the Isle of Dogs. The view is great — it’ll be even better when the hoardings on one side go — and, if London has any more warm, still nights this summer, sitting at the tables outside would make the most of it. Inside, though, it’s another matter. Lower East positively aims at mid-Atlantic nowhereness.

Lower East, not to be confused with the Eastside Inn in Clerkenwell, professes to have been “inspired by the neighbourhood restaurants of New York’s Manhattan” (as opposed to Leicester’s Manhattan, or Chelmsford’s?). Perhaps cod-Yank is a canny marketing pitch for the punters in Canary Wharf? There were certainly a surprising number of loud American voices in the hubbub last weekend.

Right from the off, you get painfully false hospitality, being introduced to your hostess, asked if you’ve had a good day and urged “Enjoy!”
There is a big circular bar with stools to perch on and maybe pick up other perchees from, while the bistro around this bar has an odd dancefloor feel, despite its mix of banquettes and tables. So loud was the music, and correspondingly so loud the voices, that it was difficult to talk, a problem the stressed couple next to us solved by moving to sit side by side.

It didn’t help that our waitress had such a strangely affected voice — was it a pastiche of Marilyn Monroe or the product of a previously undiscovered Welsh valley? — that, even cupping our ears, we couldn’t understand her.

The menu is short and simple, featuring “New York-style French dishes” and “classic British and American comfort food”. I went straight for lobster and chips — “Maine grilled lobster, roast garlic butter”, £15 the half, £30 the whole — only to be told, Basil Fawlty-style, that they had just sold the last one. Lobster was off at 8pm on Friday.

A crab cake starter (£7) was two smallish patties of claw meat, quite moist although not very crab-flavoured, served with some mayonnaise, or very bland aioli, and a little salad of dill-dressed cucumber in a sweetened dressing.

Shrimp salad (£7) came in a sundae glass, with three prawns hanging over the edge. Inside there was some avocado and softened pepper but not much detectable salad: essentially, it was a prawn and mayo calorie grenade. In lieu of the lobster, I was advised to try the monkfish piccante (£15). A generous serving, cooked with caper berries and a lemony butter sauce, it came piled up on some decent spinach, perked up with pine nuts. But the fish itself tasted a lot less fresh than some plastic-packed fillets from M&S I’d cooked earlier in the week, never mind the quality you can buy from Steve Hatt. Not inedible, just a touch fatigued, as we were too by now.

“Free-range pot roast chicken” (£14) was much better — good quality breast and leg, tender and flavoursome, served in a big white bowl with good sticky stock, fresh carrots and peas — simple and enjoyable, domestic cooking really, except perhaps for those compelled to eat out so often that such simplicity is all they crave.

On the urging of a waiter who claimed some American customers had already told him it was the best they had ever had, we ordered baked cheesecake (£6). Although we managed the raspberry sorbet and strawberries decorating the slice, the stodgy, overpoweringly sweet cheesecake defeated us, even the smallest taste coating the mouth.

What I will remember most about Lower East is the organisation of its wine list. Most lists are organised by region; some by cépage; others by supposed style and weight. This one, however, is organised on the principle of gross financial insult. Its categories are “Cheap” (£13.95-£15.95), “Decent” (£19.95-£22.95) and “Very Good” (£24.95-£28.95), before soaring off into the realm of “Other”. If you were entertaining a client, or pursuing a date, would you dare to go cheap?

We chose a cheap Spanish garnacha rosado, more than adequate for the food. Was this why the peroxided waitress, after asking us if we’d like to order again, promptly carried our bottle off with a good half-glass still left? If I hadn’t been reviewing, I’d have chased her.

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

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