The Handbook Reviews: Counter 71
What is the best thing about a tasting menu? Is it being untethered from the tyranny of choice, feeling that weight off your shoulders as you relinquish control to the chef, free from the headache of mulling over a menu? Undoubtedly, that plays a role. But to me, it’s the experimentation that’s forced upon you. Argue all we like, really we’re all creatures of habit and generally err towards our usual favourites far more frequently than we’d like to admit. It’s great to be pushed outside your comfort zone, and especially fun when the tasting menu is specifically designed so that ingredients can be seen through new eyes (and tongues).
Counter 71, the new venture from Joe Laker, previously Head Chef at the renowned but unfortunately closed Fenn, has a stripped down concept that does exactly that, while aiming to challenge preconceptions about British cuisine. Located on Nile Street in Shoreditch, there are no waiters, and every night a maximum of 16 guests sit at a green marble counter to watch as a trio of chefs and one sommelier prepare a 15 – yes, 15 – course meal.
What sets it apart
It’s fair to say that Counter-71 is an “ingredient-first” menu. The technique is, of course, first class, and its innovation is deployed to give the ingredients a starring role. It can be viewed as a response to a somewhat ambivalent attitude towards British food culture; the raw ingredients are as good as anywhere, but it hasn’t exactly coincided with it piercing through the world’s consciousness to become a culinary heavyweight. The craft of lots of the country’s most famous chefs – Gordon Ramsay, Clare Smyth – is rooted in French cuisine. For the wider world, the idea of ‘British cooking’ still reductively amounts to a roast and baked beans on toast.
We have a similar dichotomy in my home in Ireland. Somewhere in the last half-century, our restaurants suddenly seemed to recognise our unique advantage as a small island country with an entirely unbroken Atlantic ocean to our West, and started experimenting with seafood.
It’s along these lines of innovation that Laker is trying to seize an opportunity.
Our experience
The unique set-up means it feels more like a private party than a restaurant. First, you head downstairs to the Lowcountry, a US inspired basement cellar bar where you can start with a cocktail and eyeball your fellow diners, before heading upstairs for the meal.
Naturally, for a 15-course menu, some of the courses are going to have to be small unless you want to be wheeled out in a food coma, so to start you are hit with a quick flurry of one-bites – langoustine custard with crab, smoked egg on english muffin, beef tartare with fermented chilli and bone marrow. The flavours are complex and rich, and just as you think one more might just be too heavy, you’re served the star of the opening salvo; heirloom tomatoes, dehydrated to varying degrees to offer a complex array of textures, with rhubarb and elderflower. The combination of sharpness and sweetness undercuts the density of the first few courses.
It’s a great example of the philosophy of the restaurant. The flavours, techniques and processes involved in putting together each course are all engineered with one goal in mind – how can we showcase this main ingredient to bring out its best? The menu changes depending on seasonality, and in late July seafood was given a starring role for its version of the ‘main’ course (which is really four different dishes). Smoked eel with barbecued kohlrabi hit the textural and umami sweetspot, and cod with oyster and lovage is deftly balanced. These are, more or less, all ingredients that will be familiar to the diner but it’s through the variety of pairing, technique and presentation they are showcased in a novel way.
The verdict
The customers-at-the-counter, no-waiters fare might, in a place with a less centralised vision, come across as a bit gimmicky. Instead, it feels essential to the intimacy of the experience. Aided by the ever changing seasonality of the menu, the bespoke wine pairing, the diner is just about as close to the source of what they are eating and drinking as they can be. It comes to £110 for the set menu, with an additional £75 for the wine pairing (which is recommended), so perfect for a special occasion. It’s the quality of fine-dining without any of the pretension. It’s going to be fun to see how this one develops as it grows into itself.
Counter 71
71 Nile St, London N1 7RD
MORE OF OUR REVIEWS
