London,

The Princess

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Cuisine: Australian
Dinner for two with wine £80-100.

76 Paul Street, EC2A 4NE

Nearest Tube: Old Street

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Description: This Shoreditch two-year-old (sibling to Farringdon's Easton) wins nothing but praise for its "sophisticated gastropub fare"; the stylish small dining room is up a spiral staircase, over the main bar.

Food:    Service:    Ambience:   

Phone: 020 7729 9270

Good for: Good food, Ambience.

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New tricks at The Princess of Shoreditch

 

Needlessly pretentious: the cooking at the Princess of Shoreditch is trying too hard to be different

Three silly tricks new restaurants play:
*They artily print their menus in very small, sometimes very faint, type, on paper that’s grey or brown rather than white, which makes them completely illegible in candlelight to anybody middle-aged or worse. I deal with this frustation just by getting up from the table and taking the menu over to the nearest available light, inside or out, ignoring any embarrassment caused. Would it be more Boy-Scouty to pack a little torch when going out to eat in future?

*They serve their food not on boring old plates, as used successfully for generations, but in great big shallow bowls with sloping edges which ensure that knives and forks slide right down into your food, getting the handles mucky, over and over again.

*Instead of organising their wine list by country and region, a simple form of classification that has served adequately for yonks, they mix them all up together under half-witted categories of their own — “Crisp, Fresh, Fruity”, “Ripe, Mineral, Aromatic”, “Generous, Round, Full”, “Juicy, Supple, Spicy”, “Soft, Bright, Elegant”, “Structured, Complex, Broad” — which mean almost nothing.

Tick, tick, tick. All three of these bêtises have been embraced by the new owners of the Princess of Shoreditch. The handsome pub, dating back to 1742, was bought earlier this year by Scott Hunter and Maria Larsen and reopened a couple of weeks ago, with a kitchen team led by the French chef Benoît Doutres, “ex-Moulin de Mougins”, the Côte d’Azur hotel de luxe, where Roger Vergé once cooked.

There’s a brasserie arrangement seating 40 or so downstairs and, in a pleasant room upstairs, reached by a scary iron spiral staircase, a more formal restaurant, seating a similar number again. The room has been painted in muted greens that look right for the period, has cod-ancient pix on the walls and makes the most of its tall piano nobile windows. The intention, say Hunter and Larsen, has been to create “somewhere that we ourselves would want to go time and time again” — a fine aspiration.

We ate upstairs, much quieter than down. The menu is sensibly short, offering half-a-dozen starters and mains, changing frequently. Rabbit and tarragon terrine (£6.50) was two brightly marbled slices with lots of carrot among the shreds of meat, strongly flavoured with the herb — good texture, nice enough taste, nothing special. The plate was decorated with a feathery black smear of some kind of reduction, perhaps balsamic, so thick and tacky as to be untouchable. Three scallops (£9.50), apparently caramelised in a little orange juice, came in a creamy, buttery pool of wild mushrooms with spinach — pleasant enough, if too fatty.

From the mains, which included pork belly, lamb, and rib-eye steak, we had rashly chosen the day’s vegetarian option, “wild mushrooms, crispy filo pasty, spinach, boccocini” (£12.50), which was basically the same wild mushroom and cream concoction that had surrounded the scallops and wasn’t a welcome sight again so soon — a warning from the waiter would have been helpful. It was not enhanced by the browned pastry and mediocre balls of mozzarella chucked in to bolster the plate.

Monkfish (£16.50) was better: two good slices served with crushed potatoes, surrounded by truffled creamy leeks as a sauce although, in a pub, it was offputting to see the fish and spuds arrive constructed into one of those tall towers which never bode well. Why? What are they for? Don’t they make you think unhappily of the fingerwork involved?

Altogether, this cooking seemed over-reduced, too gluey, too creamy and buttery to make much sense as a meal served in a pub. The food was striving too hard to make an impression, to be a bit different, to announce its own class. From the short list of puddings, a rosemary-flavoured crème brûlée, served with a purée of gooseberries on the side (£6) merely emphasised how appropriate the classic flavouring of intense vanilla is to the dish.

Proceedings weren’t eased by our charming waiter getting things wrong, unable to find the wine we wanted, first on the illegible wine-list and then physically in the sideboard, taking an order for cheese and forgetting it completely, bringing a glass of Merlot when we had asked for Malbec.

With one pudding, a bottle of white burgundy, and two glasses of wine kindly comped by the duff waiter, the bill, with service, came to £95.57.
Although this new incarnation of the Princess of Shoreditch is trying hard, it’s not a place we left planning to revisit. We felt a needlessly pretentious meal that we hadn’t much enjoyed had done us no good at all. A pub’s a pub for a’ that.

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

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