Everything about Bird of Smithfield, the new restaurant from The Ivy’s former executive Alan Bird, shouts “Design!” It has to be a shout so it will be heard: in the small upstairs dining room there is, in addition to the buzz of happy diners, the palpable sense of many months’ stormy discussions of décor still ringing in the air. You picture round after round of tactical voting – of compromise and counter-argument – a sort of Eurovision Song Contest of interior design. Someone has pushed for these plush, comfy, utterly inappropriate herringbone-and-tartan upholstered dining chairs, but had to concede, in return, that there shouldn’t be table linen. One can only imagine how fraught was the discussion on whether this would be the sort of restaurant where the staff fold your napkin when you nip to the loo mid-meal (they don’t). The word “muddle” comes inexorably to mind.
The room isn’t small in an intimate way, but a congested one. You hold your elbows tight to your sides as you cut your food, and fear for your glass of red every time a guest or a member of staff sidles past your table. It’s no help that a quarter of the room is given over, inexplicably, to a very large bar, behind which a flustered-looking young man mixes the occasional cocktail and is otherwise left alone.
On the plus side: a fully mirrored ceiling allows the room to feign grander dimensions (and lets you see what everyone else has ordered for dinner). My dining companion, who customarily responds to the noise made by a knife brushing breadcrumbs off a tablecloth much the way a spaniel does to an ultrasonic whistle, was delighted that the lack of tablecloth obviated that situation; you generate a small mountain of crumbs as you consume a loaf of sourdough, baked on site and utterly excellent.
Minus points: who knows how many hours of consultation were billed before the decision was taken to style the (unisex) toilets “Birds and Bees”? Was no-one familiar with the euphemism? “Bees”, I suppose, is meant to play on the honeycomb motif that swarms over the wallpaper in the stairwell and ground floor lounge, and which riffs in turn on the hexagonal windowblocks visible in the flank of Smithfield Market, across the road, but that’s a bit of a leap.
Despite there being proper art on the walls – including a minimalist still life I rather coveted – this isn’t the high-end restaurant it might be if it were located in central London, but a fun, lively room for a more casual dinner. Bird doesn’t focus on the dining room only; the townhouse building contains a clubbish lounge, and a basement bar – The Birdcage – suggests something more like a members’ club where one might have a pre-prandial drink on the ground floor, head upstairs for a casual supper, then descend to the basement for a night on the tiles. There’s a roof terrace, too, for those hardy enough to brave a London spring evening. (Bring your overcoat.)
With this in mind, perhaps one should forgive the menu at Bird of Smithfield some of its solecisms. No matter the setting, however, a starter of pig cheeks – three super-dense hunks of suspiciously springy meat seemingly coated in Findus breadcrumb – is a disaster. The dish, finished, like much we ate, with edible flowers, looks great, but the flavours are dull and the meat lacked any succulence. They’re served on a layer of rather dry basil tapenade, but if you’re going to serve, essentially, upmarket McNuggets, you may as well go the whole hog (sorry) and serve it with ketchup. Pork belly, served as a main with garlic leaves, a rather sorry looking edible pansy, and a mash of discomfiting wateriness, was something of a qualified success. The crackling has been removed from the slices of pork belly and posed, instead, upright in the wodge of mash (a rather nursery-ish way to serve it), as if this, frankly, vital element is an optional extra. Divorced from its crust’s savour and snap, the naked slabs of melting white meat and translucent fat are all too undifferentiated in texture. No-one ordering pork belly is watching their waistline. Leave the crackling be.
By contrast, a main dish of chicken cooked four ways – including a roasted breast, confit leg, the heart and liver served with a little leaf salad in an accompanying cocotte – is quite excellent. (A place called Bird couldn’t allow this dish not to be.) A wafer thin rectangle of stuffing, and a deeply savoury jus in which you can taste hours upon hours of careful reduction and clarification, and which I felt I could swig down by the mugful, set this dish apart.
London’s still in love with retro desserts, and Bird’s include a punning take on rhubarb and custard (whose custard? Go on, guess), a lemon posset of tooth-dissolving sugariness, and a rich chocolate pot topped with a layer of caramel cream, properly salted – none of this mimsy “one or two grains” nonsense you get from restaurants tiptoeing after the trend. I’m not convinced that the sorbet billed as white strawberry was quite that – it had the hue and slightly overweening flavour of blackcurrant – but a scoop of rhubarb ice-cream was an absolute knockout. As someone who was brought up on stewed rhubarb to which neat Ribena had been added during cooking “to help the colour”, I appreciated this ice cream’s very honest pale green colour.
Unlike many of the new brasseries popping up all over central London, such as Balthazar and Brasserie Chavot, this Bird is shy of the limelight. It’s smaller, quieter (an evening at Balthazar leaves you with tinnitus), and a little out of the main way; by early evening, all business for the day is concluded at Smithfield Market, and the streets around it are quite deserted. Bird evinces, in these markers and its by-committee décor, a certain lack of faith in itself. With a little more attention to the dishes, not to mention a little more space between tables, these elements could set it apart from its peers – in a good way. C
Bird of Smithfield, 26 Smithfield St, London EC1A 9LB
birdofsmithfield.com; 020 7559 5100