Clerkenwell has slowly but surely established itself as one of London’s most exciting dining destinations, with restaurants of the calibre of St John, The Modern Pantry and Moro drawing in the discerning crowds of gourmands, who seem attracted by the combination of the hip locale and quality of the top chefs in the area, including Fergus Henderson, Anna Hansen and, now, Bjorn van der Horst.
Bjorn, who runs the Eastside Inn with his wife Justine, is a former chef of Mayfair’s Greenhouse restaurant, as well as chef-patron of the Michelin-starred La Noisette, which was part of the Gordon Ramsay empire. Setting up on his own in Clerkenwell, the van der Horsts opened a restaurant which is half fine dining emporium, half French bistro.
The fine dining side of the operation is heavily based around local market produce, and allowing diners a degree of leeway in how their food is cooked, whereas the bistro is a more traditional operation. The set-piece dish here is a cote de boeuf that is shared between two people, which allows classically excellent cooking to dominate over a superb piece of beautifully prepared meat, served up with delicious bearnaise sauce and delicately spiced chips. But then everything on the menu is intelligently prepared and served, whether it’s an hors d’oeuvre of duck rillette, crab cakes with paprika mayonnaise or a wickedly decadent Grand Marnier souffle as a dessert. All this is accompanied by a well-chosen and comprehensive wine list, offering everything from good, carefully selected wines by the glass to some flamboyant vintages at the higher end of the list.
It’s too early to say whether Michelin will choose to recognise Bjorn’s cooking in the same way that it did at La Noisette or The Greenhouse, but there can be no doubt, from a visit to the bistro, that it is doing an excellent job at presenting a clear, unpretentious menu well, but with real flair and passion in its execution. It’s hard to think what else you could wish for somewhere like this.
40 St John St, London EC1 www.esilondon.com
