Restaurant Story

Tom Sellers tells his story and the story of British food through an ever-evolving tasting menu of seasonal dishes. The restaurant gained its Michelin star after five months of opening in 2013 and has retained it ever since.

Home - Restaurant Story

http://www.restaurantstory.co.uk

Restaurant Story, 201 Tooley Street, London SE1 | The Independent

Not in the case of Story, the white-hot new restaurant housed in what looks like a garden centre on a traffic island just south of the Thames in Bermondsey.

During opening week, the here-be-dragons territory at the scruffier end of Tower Bridge rang to the keening of disoriented restaurant critics and bloggers, whose desperate attempts to be first through the doors of Story were endangered by their inability to find it.

Because Story's young chef, Tom Sellers, is a rising star, with a CV that reads like a directory of the world's best restaurants: he trained with Tom Aikens and went on to work at Per Se, Noma and with Adam Byatt of Trinity.

But it's what comes with the bread that's the story – an edible candle, made from beef dripping which melts into a dippable pool as it's heated by the flame.

Like a good book, Restaurant Story left me feeling stimulated, satisfied, and wanting to tell my friends about it.

Restaurant Story: Home

Restaurant: Story, London SE1 | Life and style | The Guardian

Seems he's impervious to what restaurant observers call hypesteria: the condition of being so wound up by an imminent opening that you work yourself into an actual frenzy.

Then raw scallop with the slippery sweetness of a first snog, spiked with horseradish cream and more nasturtium, and served with cucumber spheres black with dill "ash": sensory light and shade.

I knew Sellers was one to watch when I helped judge (anonymously) the YBF Awards last year, and was enchanted by the arrival of a candle in a vintage, nursery-rhyme holder.

Some of it is squirm-inducing: the story theme is battered insensible, with diners asked to leave a book behind (I was thinking 50 Shades, since I ain't reading it) and each dish comes with its own tale.

Sellers may be cocky enough to call his warm-up London and New York pop-ups "Foreword" and "Preface", but he can walk the walk: his food is genuinely directional.