http://www.timeout.com/london/restaurants/reviews/14968.html

    *

      Eastside Inn’s fortunes will be inexorably tied to the fortunes of the City. Yet this new, high-profile launch seems to be hedging its bets both ways by opening as fancy fine dining restaurant on one side, but also as a more affordable contemporary bistro, just in case the hoped-for big spenders don’t come.

      My first visit was to the former. A central kitchen separates it from the less formal ‘Bistro’, and a dreary little bar at the back of the horseshoe-shaped space forms the holding area for both. The fancy side, which they call the ‘Gastro’, exhibits all the signs of the star-chasing, fine dining restaurant that I’m surprised to see opening this year (Eastside Inn opened eight months behind schedule).

      The wine list is mainly French, and populated with expensive Burgundy and Bordeaux as well as a few more affordable bottles. Wine upselling is all part of the game; I asked about a glass of red, and was recommended the most expensive glass on the list (a £12 pinot noir) with no mention of cost. The table settings, cutlery and crockery are all very nice, very expensive. This side has the hushed feel of a job interview waiting room.

      Service was slow in the first week. The set menus cost either £45 or £65 per head, and give choices at each course. The £45 menu allowed four of us to try almost everything on the menu.

      But first – as is the way with fine dining restaurants – there are nibbles to tide you over until the starters arrive (as they took more than an hour to appear, this wasn’t a bad idea). The highlight of this was a slab of foie gras, cryptically referred to on the menu just as ‘Toulouse’, which melted in the mouth just as it should.

      Yet of the actual the starters, only some dishes were hits. We relished the dense flavours of the braised veal sweetbreads, and the delicate foam of a cappuccino covering poached foie gras, which had a hint of coffee and amaretto flavours to it. Less impressive was a steamed slice of eel, with the bones still in; a cockney dish it might be, but this was bland and mushy, and the accompanying fresh peas added colour but little else to the dish.

      The main courses were better. Salt marsh lamb was the best of them, served with oddly-textured ricotta gnocchi. Aged rib eye of beef was perfectly tender slivers of rare flesh, served with a ‘ratte mash’ which seemed to be half butter.

      Up until this point, the dishes had been mainstream Modern European fare, executed with haute cuisine precision; but we had expected more fireworks and risk-taking. Then the desserts arrived, flouncing in late like tipsy drag queens. Each of the two hollow spheres resembled Christmas tree ornaments, one holding a milk sorbet (the golden orb) and the other cherry and hazelnut (the white ball that looks like a ping pong ball on steroids). Just in case you weren’t already paying enough attention, this latter one is flambéed at the table.

      The bistro is less pretentious, a bit noisier, more down to earth, and more fun. Prices are on the high side, but not exorbitant. Service even in the second week was still a muddle. They have nice wines by the glass, and classic French dishes on a brief place mat menu. A little dish of cassoulet was textbook perfect, the sausage, pork and haricot beans topped with a crisp crust of breadcrumbs. A starter of tender baby squid was spiced up with smoked paprika and a lime vinaigrette. Puds, such as crème brûlée, are relatively simple; the presentation equally so.

      We can’t really quibble with chef-proprietor Bjorn van der Horst’s cooking, but how many people are prepared to pay £3.25 for a bowl of radishes, or £4.95 for a side dish of ratatouille in a bistro – or indeed pay £70 per head or more for a three-hour dinner in a restaurant which only opens five days a week. Five years ago Eastside Inn might have been on-message, but they’ve picked an unlucky year to cash in on the City.
    *

      Time Out London May 2009

   

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/restaurants/restaurant-317317-details/Eastside+Inn/restaurantReview.do?reviewId=23700808

Eastside Inn
Your rating
one startwo starthree starfour starfive star
Click on a star to rate
Cuisine: American
A meal for two, about £140

40 St John Street, EC1 M4AY

Nearest Tube: Farringdon Transport for London

Michelin man: Eastside Inn’s chef/patron Bjorn van der Horst won a star at The Greenhouse and a second at Gordon Ramsay Holdings’ now-closed La Noisette
Eastside Inn (strange New Yorky name) has just opened on the site that used to house the rough-and-tumble wine bar Vic Naylor’s. Just a few yards down the road is St John —probably the single most influential restaurant in London of the past 10 years. Here Fergus Henderson pioneered a new simplicity, a return to gutsy British food, that has now been much imitated all over London. The dominant aesthetic in this area is still dictated by Smithfield meat market — warehousey, semi-industrial, a bit stark, a touch clubby, not too bourgeois.

But now here’s something completely different, feeling as out of place as if it had been transported whole from another borough, even another city. Eastside Inn is a luxury restaurant obviously aiming to win a Michelin star or two. In fact, it’s one of those places that feels so much as though it must be beneath a grand hotel that you have to keep reminding yourself there’s actually nothing above.

The chef is Bjorn van der Horst, who worked with the likes of Robuchon and Ducasse before making his reputation in London by relaunching The Greenhouse, where he was awarded a Michelin star.

He then went to work for Gordon Ramsay as “chef patron” at La Noisette, and soon won another star there before it closed. Swiss-born, with a Dutch father and Spanish mother, brought up in France, van der Horst’s style is unabashed haute cuisine.

On one side of a big open kitchen there’s the restaurant proper, with 34 covers; on the other, a 50-seat bistro, offering French regional classics, a bit more cheaply. Two menus are offered in the restaurant, the set Discovery —seven courses for £65 — or the Classic, from which you can choose three courses for £45. We went Classic and chose for ourselves.

After the arty glass cover plates had been retrieved, proceedings began with a supplementary course of amuse-gueles, imperiously titled “Awakening Your Palette”, intended as evocations of three towns that van der Horst especially likes: Toulouse, Paris and Nerja.

Toulouse was three thin slices of mi-cuit foie gras, on a small slice of toasted country bread: great stuff, pure and simple. Paris, more complicatedly, was a tiny cube of rich fromage de tete, accompanied by miniature slices of cornichon and cooked capers, topped, too, with a dash of caviar — and this little taste was indeed surprisingly reminiscent of set menus eaten in Parisian bistros many years ago.

Nerja, on the Costa del Sol, was represented by a white almond gazpacho, sweet and creamily textured although quite peppery, poured at table over a small mound of Bloody Mary sorbet. The first taste delivered a big hit, very properly Andalucian, but then even a small bowl became more than enough of the same again.

From the starters we opted for one of van der Horst’s signature dishes: foie gras (again, sorry), cooked from raw this time, with espresso syrup and amaretto foam. It was sensationally good, crisped on the outside, perfectly undercooked inside, with an enjoyable little crunchiness that didn’t overwhelm the whole. Such unctuousity, a hint of sweetness, first-rate goose-liver precisely cooked — this was a blast.

Likewise, warm Scottish lobster, caramelised endive and vanilla brown butter was a completely delicious artefact, if not any rational sort of food. There was a generous big chunk of curled lobster tail topped with a mighty claw, surrounded by lots of vanilla-ish browned butter and pieces of chicory, cooked down into a little sweetness of their own. Vanilla works really well with lobster (a combination made famous by Alan Senderens, supposedly as a foil for buttery Chardonnays) but already we were beginning to feel a little overwhelmed by the richness and sweetness of these dishes.

Blanquette of turbot with morels was a faultless piece of fish, correctly poached and surrounded by a buttery yellow sauce cooked entirely separately from the turbot itself — a slightly disconcerting effect when you’re more used to rustic or domestic cooking than grande cuisine.

Salt-marsh lamb, ricotta gnocchi, orange and parsley was the only failure in the meal, a dish so off-key as, all on its own, to shake your faith in the taste of the chef who cooked it. The lamb itself, served rarer than requested, was two excellent small fillets. But the sweet and overpowering marmaladey orange seemed wholly inappropriate to lamb. We didn’t finish the dense, slightly rubbery as well as thickly cheesy, gnocchi.

Little verbena sorbets, served in blocks of ice, were welcome refreshers, tasting just like scented geraniums smell. There then followed two crazily OTT puddings, arriving as spheres bedecked with gold leaf. One was chocolate with a joke popcorn element; the other was nicer, in fact quite a wow: a meringue construction designed to disintegrate before your eyes as flambéed liqueur was poured over it, contained a yummy fruit sorbet with raspberries and marinated cherries.

The wine list is, as you would suppose, steeply expensive, although full of enticements. The cheaper wines by the glass — a Languedoc viognier at £5.50, a Côtes du Rhône at £7.50 — were excellent examples, however, and tap water was brought unasked.

For the level of the cooking and the lavishness of the ingredients, the price here is fair, a bargain even, should aspiring-to-Michelin be the way you want to go.

The big disappointment, damping down the whole experience, is the design by Carole Cobban. The room feels dark, leathery, beigey, oppressively Spanish in feeling, if not Zara-esque. There are gruesome carpet tiles and nowhere any white linen or flowers to cheer the atmosphere. We sat in prime position in the big window on the street — but it was masked with a net curtain, a weird effect in super-urban St John Street. The whole impression was reminiscent of dining in a heavily old-fashioned hotel in the Midi dedicated to keeping the sun out. But then quite what Eastside Inn is doing at all in Clerkenwell is a bit of a mystery altogether.