Restaurant Story

A wander down Tooley Street from London Bridge station eventually brings you to a purpose built cabin with slatted wooden walls and a picture window front lurking behind a small garden and statue of Samuel Bourne Bevington, the first mayor of Bermondsey. Aside from diners sitting by the window, it’s not immediately apparent that this is a restaurant, although the “Green Egg” grill on the back deck is a slightly stronger indicator. Only a small nameplate by the door on Queen Elizabeth Street confirms it as Restaurant Story.

Restaurant Story was one of the most anticipated London openings of early 2013. Backed by Adam Byatt of Trinity it’s headed by Nottinghamshire born Tom Sellers in his first role as head chef. A school leaver at 16, he started his career at Tom Aikens before moving to New York to work as chef de partie at Thomas Keller’s Per Se. He followed this with time at Adam Byatt’s Trinity restaurant in Clapham and a spell at Noma in Copenhagen. A couple of pop-ups, Preface and Foreword gave an indication of his style of cooking and also included the first appearance of the beef dripping candle (more later).

The overall design inside the restaurant is fairly minimal although there are random touches like a pair of stuffed crows that overlook the diners. The white-walled room with its plain concrete floor has plain wooden tables accompanied by black leather chairs with space for 42 covers. The back of the room is dominated by the enclosed glass fronted kitchen and two built in bookcases spilling over with books, largely sorted by colour. The restaurant has a pleasant casual atmosphere, particularly once the meal gets into full flow. The restaurant was built on the site of a former public toilet and descending those stairs builds on expectation of Dan Dan the lavatory man greeting you at the bottom.

A thick book with menu bookmark awaits you at the table, in my case a collection of Charles Dickens’ miscellanea. A candle is brought to the table and then lit. This is a precursor to the first course of the menu whether you choose the 6-course or 10-course option. 

A rapid rush of tasters then follows. First up, toasted cod skin with piped cod roe, carrot tops and gin botanicals. It’s a pleasant bite but the flavours are more muted than expected. The English radish with kelp butter and Maldon salt doesn’t thrill. The concept of a crunchy radish filled with butter is fine but the kelp doesn’t seem to do much. The squid ink cookie with smoked eel mousse and powdered vinegar is better but still seems restrained. The cookie is similar to a McVitie’s Digestive in texture/flavour and the mousse filling is lovely. I’d hope for more aggression from the vinegar but it doesn’t materialise. The fried baby leek with potato crisp, herb & rapeseed oil emulsion is the best taster to this point with a good blend of flavour although the greens of the leek are a touch pulpy. The best of the appetisers is a rabbit sandwich with tarragon mousse and pickled carrot. The tarragon proving an excellent partner to the rabbit and every bite of is a delight. Apart from being dazed at the rapidity of these snacks’ appearance they were are generally underwhelming. However, with ten more courses to come it’s early days to be too judgemental.

The candle, meanwhile, merrily burns away. As it melts the juices drip into the tray of the brass candlestick. A sack with chunks of sourdough bread is placed on the table together with a bowl of chopped veal tongue, chicken consommé jelly, celery and parsley. The intent of the course is for you to dip the bread into the beef dripping from the candle. As with the appetisers this is nice enough but generally lacks a real thrill. Maybe it’s the familiarity from having read about this is in numerous reviews although my preference is to have beef juices in my dripping similar to that served at Aumbry where you get more of a beefy kick. The tongue pickle blend is much better with its mix of vibrant fresh flavours and the cubes of consommé jelly particularly delight. 

Any doubts about Story evaporate with the next course, Described as onion, apple and Old Tom it features several different treatments of onions with braised Lyonnaise onions underneath burnt Roscoff onions, crispy onion and chickweed. A consommé of Old Tom gin, apple and lemon thyme is poured onto the dish at the table. The mix of sweet onions is superb with the Lyonnaise onions a real highlight. A slow burner of a dish with the flavours slowly revealing themselves for a wonderful whole . Once the onion is gone, mopping up the juice with the sourdough works better for me than the dripping from the candle. A seemingly simple but delightful plate of food.

The scallop with cucumber and dill ash is another dish with lovely fresh tastes. Thin discs of scallop are marinated in meadowsweet vinegar and Maldon salt and present a wonderfully tender centrepiece to the dish. The cucumber spheres are treated two ways, blanched with a mild pickled flavour and rolled in dill ash that imparts a delicious toasted flavour to the cucumber. The horseradish cream only carries a mild flavour that compliments the scallop really well and the nasturtium adds a hint of pepper to the dish. Overall this is a very nice dish although the cucumber spheres aren’t exactly cooperative when you try to cut them.

The description of pig, chicken and langoustine gives no hint about what to expect from the dish. It consists of a mousse of chicken and langoustine encased in a ring of pig’s trotter skin that had been braised in port and red wine for six hours with a sprinkling of fresh ground black pepper on top. Accompaniments include jus from the pig trotter and langoustine consommé, pickled cherry and roasted salsify. It’s a lovely indulgent dish where the skin and mousse evaporate in the mouth but leave wonderfully decadent shadows on the palate. The fresh parsley leaves and stalks are a welcome fresh contrast and the intensely vinegary cherry lightens things too with its aromatic edge. A lovely dish.

Heritage potato with turnip and coal is another great plate of food. The unfeasibly sleek mash is wonderfully smooth with the comforting potato flavour enhanced by the mild hint of pepper. The baby turnips kick in a fresh crunch and the purée a fresh contrast to the rich potato. The coal oil has a mild flavour together with a sharpness that works really well with the indulgent potato. 

Cod’s mild flavour means that the success or otherwise of a dish can depend on the ability of the other ingredients to partner well with it. Cod, alexander and English caviar soars because of the way the lemon in oil and purée accentuates the flavour of the cod. The caramelised cod benefits from a delightful crisp crust and it flakes nicely as you cut into it. The combination of cod with slightly sweet lemon purée is wonderful but even better is a mouthful of the fish, purée and the mildly bitter alexander, a close relative of celery.  Caviar from Exmoor sturgeon reveals its gentle flavour as the eggs burst in your mouth. A dish that thrills the more you eat it.

The venison, yeast and elderberry is even better. Venison from Wick is grilled outside and combined with roasted cauliflower, pickled cabbage, jus made from lovage leaf, stems and elderberries and a cauliflower and yeast purée. The pink venison is beautifully tender and a strong focal point for the dish. The combination of cauliflower and venison is superb, particularly with the purée that is almost cheesy in flavour. Crispy rice adds crunch to the dish as well as a subtle smoky touch. The dish reveals more as you eat and combines a mix of fairly sharp flavours that work together really well. The dish is quite a journey from the unconvincing first forkful to total delight at the end as all the subtleties of the dish show themselves.  A second portion to test it further would be ideal. A wonderful dish.

Next up is a palate cleanser of rapeseed ice cream and sea buckthorn sorbet that comes with a warning to take the sorbet slowly due to the tartness of the sea buckthorn. Taking that approach makes it a real pleasure. The ice cream and sorbet are both deliciously refreshing gaining a little bit of crunch from the cookie crumbs.

Each dish comes with a full description of what’s on the plate. Almond and dill takes a different approach and is summarised with a simple “Everything that’s green is dill. Everything that’s beige is almond.” A fuller take was that it includes a lovely refreshing dill snow, gentle almond ice cream, a delightful rich almond purée, dill oil and the star of the show; a small heap of almond crumbs. These were prepared from a brittle made from roasted almonds that was then broken down to fine crumbs. They transform from dry powder to sticky nutty caramel on the tongue. A nice dish overall that really benefits from the intriguing crumbs.

Prune tea, lovage and milk isn’t a complete success for me combining prunes stewed in Earl Grey tea with lovage ice cream, milk skin and a candied lovage stem. The positives are the prunes that taste like a rich mince pie filling and the wonderful lovage ice cream. The lovage stem doesn’t seem to offer much and the thick milk skin is texturally challenging. However, the prunes and lovage ice cream are so good that it was easy to overlook the parts that don’t quite deliver.

The main dessert combines English pear, artichoke and verbena. As it arrives a strong scent of lemon verbena from the leaves and oil wafts from the dish. Thin slices of caramelised artichoke are initially unwelcome guests on the plate but the more you eat the more they make sense. The pear is superb whether chargrilled, gelled or in the compressed slices on top of the dish and the combination of the refreshing pear with the floral lemon verbena is excellent. I’m not a great fan of vegetables in desserts but the Jerusalem artichoke ice cream that underpinned the dish is superb in the way it ties everything together. This is another thought provoking dish that summarises and rounds out the menu perfectly.

But things don’t end here and unfortunately the following tasters are relatively anticlimactic. A milk bottle tray with a single bottle with multi-coloured layers and hard cardboard red and white straw signals a rhubarb and custard drink. The rhubarb is topped with crème Anglaise and sheep’s milk foam and it all adds up to a pleasant mix of flavours. It’s accompanied by the Story take on a Tunnock’s tea cake with raspberry and rose filling where the use of rose water gives a nice aromatic flavour to the marshmallow. It tends towards being overly sweet but is still quite pleasant.

Lunch at Restaurant Story proves to be quite an interesting journey. The relatively low key tasters and the dripping candle that comes across as fairly gimmicky have you wondering what you’re letting myself in for. However, the menu hits stride after the self-conscious bread course and pretty much everything else that follows is very impressive. The best bit is the way many courses reveal many different layers as you eat them showing how much thought had gone into their preparation.

The menu changes regularly so I would love to go back in a few months to see what is available. Overall I would rate Restaurant Story a thoroughly enjoyable place to eat and would happily recommend it.

I’m not sure how much they enforce the “leave a book” theme and this time I hurriedly left before they had a chance to ask me what I had for their “library”. If you visit and see something by Christopher Brookmyre or “A Corner Kick from the Middle of Nowhere” by Mitch Stansbury then there’s a good chance I’ve had a return visit.  

Overall Rating – 4.5/5