We opt for the “Surprise Menu” for our dinner at Grain Store, Bruno Loubet’s new London restaurant. For £35 a head, the table receives a variety of special dishes, some picked from the regular menu, others strangers to it. Some dishes are so surprising even the staff don’t seem to be in on them: a rich, deeply earthy consommé, slightly spicy and with one enormous wonton at its centre is deposited in front of each of us with nary a word of explanation. At the same time, a plate of butter-glistening room-temperature cooked carrots is placed on the table. “That’s carrots!” the server gaily tells us – a catchphrase in search of a gameshow.
Much of the time, this food doesn’t really need any introduction. Dense, warm, potato rye bread topped with seaweed butter, oyster and borage leaves and little purple flowers, matches savoury, salty flavours to the bread’s deeply comforting texture. A fantastic salad of salted watermelon cubes, peach slices and neat wee heaps of confit salmon is the nicest way I’ve had salmon served in years.
It’s not all about vegetables, though the menu at Grain Store is veg heavy. There are options for vegans too – the restaurant is a few doors down from the new Central Saint Martins campus, and with numbers of students (and their parents) obviously among the customers, faddy dieters are ably catered for. Two carnivore’s dishes came as part of our surprise rundown. Four little pieces of pork belly in a rather sickly coating, served aboard a corn-husk tamale packed with quinoa, large nubs of corn, and an unidentified matter that resembled additional parts of the husk, was disappointing; a dish of duck hearts, sprinkled with dill, on a sharp-sweet compote of julienned peppers and carrot was far more successful. My companion, a recovering vegetarian slowly reintroducing his palate to meats, found this dish a little too “real”; par for the course for heart, it has almost exactly the flavour and texture you’d expect of duck breast, but every so often there’s a slightly textural slip – it moves between your teeth in slightly too fleshly a way. I loved it: I ate three-quarters of the dish, boosted my iron intake for the year by 3000%, but felt it would be a long time before I wanted to indulge in this cut again.
Like its neighbours, the art college and the mighty Caravan, Grain Store has retained much of the original architecture of this converted, er, grain store. Russell Sage – of Gordon Ramsay and Goring fame – was drafted in to create an interior with Loubet’s direction of capturing the essence of an “exploded kitchen”. The walls are of raw brick, the floor a functional grey that reminds you of the schoolroom. We dined in an alcove beneath a railway arch, where three two-person tables are placed, and looked out over a long room, made narrower by the open kitchen to one side (here, variously tattooed and necktied chefs, under the guidance of Loubet himself, design the menu’s surprises) and a sort of open-plan saloon bar at the other side, where you can eat at the bar or stand around several freestanding balustrades with your friends (blondes, boys in checked shirts), presumably waiting for a stranger to walk in so you can fall silent. Through the far window, you see the undeveloped-as-yet, and entirely lovely, brickwork of the old railway siding.
Very refreshingly, though its menu skews towards the vegetarian, Grain Store doesn’t overload you with carbohydrate: there aren’t great heaps of rice or potato bulking out dishes, and (wonton aside) no pasta. Additionally, though there’s an extensive wine list (quite a few bottles in the £20–£30 range, and several by the glass), the restaurant allows you to sidestep the old “red for meat, white for fish” saw, and suggests various cocktails which can be paired with dishes. You might, then, enjoy a cedarwood lemonade with your starter, or a martini made with mustard vodka with that pork belly tamale. (To me it sounds like a surefire way to make a questionable dish unambiguously disgusting.) Teetotallers have options too, including Hay & Grass Water, described as “Hay & grass notes in water”. I’m just going to leave that for you to ponder. In addition, I was intrigued by the smoked or herb-infused wines, though they have unprepossessing names like “vinus lupus” – not intrigued enough, however, to stray from the reds n’ whites. It’s certainly an innovative way to present drinks, but maybe a bit progressive for even the trendies who are happily making Granary Square their home from home.
By the end of the night, Bruno had departed the kitchen and was chatting merrily to some friends at a table in front of us. He’s a confident chef and this is a confident menu, with perhaps a handful too many quirks at the moment. I wonder how many will endure? As someone who’s had more than enough of gourmet hot dogs and their disgusting ilk, I’d rather like to see paprika-smoked wines become the New Big Thing. C
Grain Store, 1-3 Stable Street, Kings Cross, London N1C 4AB
020-7324 4466; grainstore.com