IN BRIEF:
The spirit of Fergus at the French House is alive and well at this brilliant Shoreditch pub
Food: 9/ 10
Service: 8/ 10
Atmosphere: 8/ 10
Overall: 9/ 10
IN DETAIL:
One of the seminal moments in working out that I really liked restaurants – and to put it in the Life of Brian argot – to work out that I really, really like restaurants, was on going to the first floor dining room of The French House when it was under the direction of a (younger) Fergus Henderson, and perhaps even more formidably, Margot Henderson.
This was in the pre-St John period. The ratty old chairs that had the air of a charity shop somewhere near Stow-on-the-Wold. The tables almost inked with schoolboy graffiti. And the no-nonsense menu. In a world where fine dining meant French food and nothing else, here was punchy, full bodied cooking that took inspiration from within these shores and served it up unbowed to be washed down with, sometimes literally, gallons of wine. Bone marrow, Barnsley chops, cod – these were proper dishes. The wine was French. Obviously. To be honest, anything else was pretty much unthinkable in those days.
And then everything, across London as a whole, just got better and better, except that I got fatter and fatter, but there is a price for everything etc. However, I never forgot the feeling of being on the first floor of the French with a martini in hand, the sounds of Dean Streat cluttering away from an open sash window and the prospect of some proper grub heading my way.
So to the William IV, which is on Shepherdess Walk, which is sort of in Shoreditch, just off City Road in that area that seems equal parts converted warehouses and equal parts the sort of spectacular high rise apartment blocks that would look equally at home in Singapore or Almaty. But the pub itself is a proper East-end boozer, make no mistake. It has been refurbished by Mike Harrington and Lee Godwin, who have over a decade of experience at Barworks, where they helped grow iconic venues like Mare Street Market and the Well and Bucket.
This is their first venture on their own – and here’s a glass up to some entrepreneurial spirit and sheer balls. The pub itself has been open for about a year, and is seriously popular with a local, almost annoyingly cool crowd. Decent pints of Guiness, excellent bar snacks – think anchovies on toast or crispy fried pork belly with tamarind ketchup and a great atmosphere.
Now they have opened up the first floor and the déjà vu hit me like a punch to the face. Albeit in a good way. You head up exactly the right sort of convoluted twisting wooden staircase into rooms that are beautiful and in a perfect mix of institutional cream and pale green. Rickety tables and chairs. It’s almost like they added cigarette smoke for extra effect, although it being 2024 they clearly have not.
To start, a briny coastal martini accompanied by a Carlingford oyster. Have you ever been offered a more perfect start to a meal? Proper homage is paid with St John Bakery sourdough and cultured butter, which is just perfect to match with whipped smoked cods roe, crisps, Tabasco.
A menu you can flow through. Breaded wholetail scampi & tartare sauce is a dish which just should be on more menus. Seared scallop with garlic butter and breadcrumbs was a garlicky delight, with crunch offsetting perfectly cooked flesh. Burrata, pickled figs, olive jam, pea shoots, almonds is a lot more modern, but no bad thing for it, and boy do I love pickled figs. Or just figs. And all of these for under a tenner a plate! In cool, East London in late 2024. That’s just fantastic pricing.
And then it gets genuinely great. Pork chop, anchoïade sauce, dauphinois potatoes, baby leeks. This was proper, ballsy cooking. A giant pork chop, with the fat properly rendered and and effusing the meat. Serving it with anchoïade is a masterstroke – the classic Provençal sauce of anchovies, olive oil, white wine vinegar and garlic was perfect and lip-smacking. I asked for an extra bowl of the sauce, which I confess I then slathered liberally on the huge wedge of perfect dauphinois. A lovely, warm, sticky dish. And this was nineteen pounds and fifty pence (yes – 19.50)! That is not great value, it is epic value.
My dining companion had an excellent halibut, at an equally modest price. How do they do it with fish like that? By leveraging their contacts and using the old practice of seeing what fish is available on the day, creating dishes around the catch and pricing it properly. If they had to stock the fish on offer and offer a full suite of options every day, then the prices would be twice as high.
Puddings were good, if not quite as great as the earlier dishes: sticky toffee pudding with vanilla ice cream or, in my case, vanilla creamed rice pudding & glazed strawberries. But maybe it was too much to ask that they should be. A decent wine list – a fine Gruner Veltliner for a little over forty quid stood out – but I was more tempted by then perfect pints of Guiness that just kept on coming, served by staff who seemed genuinely to share the reckless enthusiasm of the owners.
But why not? Isn’t this how it all begins? You can just visualise some young Shoreditch couple sitting in a corner, a few martinis to the wind when one of them tastes anchoïade sauce for the first time and says, you know what, I really, really love food.
William IV Dining Room – 7 Shepherdess Walk, London, N1 7QE
The pub is open every day, the Dining Room is open Wednesday – Friday 6pm – 9.30pm and Saturday 12pm – 9.30pm
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