The Yellow Bittern, London: ‘Makes you grumble about school dinners’ – restaurant review | Food

The Yellow Bittern, 20 Caledonian Road, London N1 9DU (020 3342 2162). Starters £7 – £8; main course £20 – £28; desserts DKK 8-9. Wine from DKK 40

Cooks gather in tribes. There are the pincer chefs and the dude food chefs and the chefs with live fire forever rising from their furrowed eyebrows. Then there are the chef poets. They adhere to texts by Richard Olney and Elizabeth David, as mothers to their newborns. They pervert over ingredients. They work backwards from the experience at the table into the kitchen instead of from the kitchen outwards. And they adore a well-turned sentence. They are romantics.

Belfast-born Hugh Corcoran is very much a chef-poet; one who has even published his own writing volume. He often holds up his trousers with suspenders, wears metal-rimmed glasses and has a small town butcher about him from the 1930s who has a nice piece of gammon laid aside for you. He has cooked in the Basque Country and Paris as well as for pop-ups in London, where his pared down dishes have won him a following. Now comes Yellow Bittern, which is less a restaurant than a statement of intent via the lunch medium. It only opens on weekdays for two meetings, at noon and 2:00 p.m., and not at all for dinner. Orders can only be made by phone or “postcard” and they only accept cash. There’s no printed wine list because “it’s all in Hugh’s head”, but the offering is all natural, running from £40 a bottle (and £10 a glass) to £300.

The Yellow Bittern, named after an 18th century Gaelic poem about a bird that couldn’t break the ice with its beak to get a drink, takes the home of the King’s Cross Luncha biannual cultural magazine edited by Lady Frances von Hofmannsthal. That’s why there’s an on-site bookshop, which occupies an institutional space in the basement that looks like the library of a TB sanitarium circa 1936. Here are works by Seamus Heaney and Samuel Beckett, as is upstairs in the sparse, yellow-walled dining room, which has only seating for 18, hanging a photograph of Brendan Behan alongside a portrait of Lenin.

This, according to one of Corcoran’s Instagram posts, is a prized possession that follows him everywhere, for he is a lifelong communist devoted to many causes, including anti-colonialism in general and a United Ireland in particular. A recent Corcoran Instagram posts celebrating the founder of the Soviet Union as the “liberator of the slaves” were met, among other things, with comments describing Vladimir Ilyich’s complicity in the murderous Red Terror and the founding of the gulags. How you engage with his politics, which may stick in the throat of some, is entirely up to you. You can just have lunch, as Fergus and Margot Henderson, the chief poets, have already done with many other chefs from across London. On the day we are there, for example, another table is occupied by a group of chefs from Noma in Copenhagen. The Yellow Bittern had only been open for six working days and was already a point of pilgrimage.

The small dining room with its paper-covered tables has a small open kitchen with a single oven and an induction ring. Spread across the bar when we arrive, along with a barrel of warm ale, are many baked goods: bricks of cloud-grey soda bread, neatly tucked £40 guinea fowl pies to share between two, and a huge glossy, quilted slice of apple pie for dessert . The limited menu is written up on a blackboard and its best is delightful. The nutty soda bread is served with generous dollops of yellow butter that can be spread so thick you can sink your teeth into it. The butter is unsalted, but there’s a bowl of the white stuff on the table so you can add your own hypertension. Among the plates on the bar were shiny leaves of simmered leeks, which we are told in a whisper by Lady Frances, were plucked from her country garden “only yesterday”. They arrive topped with a nose mustard vinaigrette, chopped boiled eggs and fresh green herbs, a version of the recipe in Simon Hopkinson and Lindsay Barehams Fried chicken and other stories.

As I enjoy it, I watch Corcoran lift from the oven a joint of crackling pork; a fabulous piece of meat, tenderly cooked, which is thickly sliced ​​and plonked on top of a pile of white beans for £28. Finally comes a wedge of that apple pie, which has the all-important third interface layer, where the sweet stewed apple is fused with the inner thigh of the pastry to create a great sugar, fruit and butter softness. We also have cheeses, i.a St. Tola goat and a blue called Young Buckwhich softens the working glass natural red that my companion orders. This lunch makes the point about the virtues of simplicity well.

But there’s another lunch here, where the whole performative nature makes you mutter about having been served school dinners, only at Hackney still wine bar prices. A boring leek and potato soup, as thick as wallpaper paste at £7, is served lukewarm. For the main, there’s a bowl of sausages and potatoes in broth billed as Dublin Coddle, a sumptuous name that can’t hide the fact that it’s two bought Cumberland sausages, some potatoes and broth for £20. The mud-baked rice porridge is served cold. In its oval dish on the bar it looked quite jubilant; on the plate it looks like something your older cat might have coughed up. There’s a fine line between celebrating simplicity and just not turning your back on it. Impressively, Yellow Bittern walked both sides of that line over a lunch. A few days later, Corcoran complained on Instagram that diners weren’t ordering enough. “Restaurants are not public benches,” he moaned. “You’re there to spend some money.” Maybe open for dinner when people are more happy to drink.

The funny thing about the whole venture is that it sells itself as cool and radical. This is a restaurant of the artistic set, which publishes a cultural magazine and has thrown in 21st century frills such as credit card payments and a website. In reality, however, it plays like the small conservatism of John Major’s wistful speech about a fantasy England of “warm beer, unconquerable green suburbs, dog lovers and – as George Orwell said – old girls cycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist”. That reference will no doubt drive an old communist like Hugh Corcoran absolutely insane.That doesn’t make it any less appropriate.

News bites

Following the recent news that thousands of pounds worth of gift vouchers will not be honored following the closure of Birmingham restaurant Purnell’s because it is now in receivership, comes a somewhat bigger voucher story from the US. TGI Fridays that has declared bankruptcy. According to the hospitality industry’s newsletter Propel, there is a risk that franchisees will be left responsible for outstanding coupons, the value of which is 50 million. USD far exceeds the available cash reserves. However, lawyers for the company have said they intend to honor their obligations. Meanwhile in Leeds, the business behind chef Michael O’Hare’s restaurant Man Behind the Curtain, which recently traded as Psycho Sandbar, has been wound up with debts close to £1m.

In Lyme Regis, it’s farewell to chef Mark Hix’s Oyster and Fish House after 16 years of trading. The last service will be on 7 December, after which the restaurant will come under new ownership. Hix says he has no plans to open any new restaurants, but is working on various projects and will continue to run his Kitchen Table events from his Charmouth home.

Great British menu winner Kirk Haworth and his partner Keeley have announced the launch next spring of a French farm and retreat, to go along with their plant-based restaurant Plates, which opened in Shoreditch in July to huge demand tables. The new venture, in Lot-et-Garonne, will have seven bedrooms along with a gym and sauna. Four-night packages start from £1,000 per person. Find more information here

Join Jay Rayner and Grace Dent on Monday 16 December as they discuss his new cookbook Nights Out At Home, live at Kings Place and live streamed globally. Order tickets here or at guardian.live

Email Jay at [email protected] or follow him on X @jayrayner1