St. John

St. JOHN has three restaurants, a bakery, a winery and a wine company. Each adheres to the distinct style and philosophy which is so integral to St. JOHN and which has been so influential.

St. JOHN

https://www.stjohnrestaurant.com

St. John Restaurant

St John Bread and Wine

ST. JOHN BREAD and WINE opened across the street from London's Spitalfields Market in May 2003.

Initially, the idea was to find a home for our bakery operations.

However, it had outgrown the original Smithfield restaurant to include a simple food offering and possible wine shop.

As plans for the former bank developed, and as people expressed interest, it became apparent that there was a desire for a restaurant.

Therefore, the Commercial Street premises became the dining room, wine and bakery shop as it now is.

Smithfield 26 St. John Street, London, EC1M 4AY

Fergus Henderson and Trevor Gulliver opened St. JOHN in October 1994.

The former smokehouse, situated around the corner from London's Smithfield Market had fallen into serious disrepair since ham and bacon smoking ceased in 1967.

If you visit St. John you'll find the building pretty much as it was found.

We've painted the walls white, installed a bar and a bakery in two of the chimneys, a kitchen and a dining room in the former packing rooms and a private room in the former loading bay and topped the bar with 20-foot high skylights.

St John, restaurant review: Fergus Henderson's temple of gastronomy

St John in Clerkenwell is a flawless restaurant in an unimprovable setting which serves perfect food and drink at stupendously affordable prices.

I'm not talking about the restaurant here, though that's good; I'm talking about the bar, with its stripped-back whitewash walls and bakery churning out hot, fresh puddings and loaves.

Magnificent Welsh rarebit with lashings of cheese and mustard on white toast (£6) is a very filling starter, and is followed by crunchy smoked sprats with potato and dill (£8.70) and – my personal favourite – devilled kidneys (£8.50), cooked to the nanosecond, so that they're still quite hard but full of that iron aroma of high-grade offal, served on toast and doused with a salty gravy.

Here's another: beetroot, red cabbage, chervil and crème fraîche (£8), a happy marriage of colours, flavours and textures; sloppy, gelatinous bone marrow served on toast, drowning in butter and with fresh parsley salad to cut through the grease (£8.50); and tender, cold roast Middle White pork and dandelion (£9.20).

But the best dish, the one worth travelling from Manchester or the Moon for is one you can do at home, though not as well: Eccles cake and Lancashire cheese (£8.30), an amazing alliance of flaky but substantial pastry, tightly packed mincemeat exploding with sweetness and joy, and a crumbly, pungent slice of north England's finest.

Restaurant review: St John, Smithfield, London - Telegraph

Which is why St John, second only to the Fat Duck in the recent S. Pellegrino list of Britain's finest restaurants, is also declared the 14th greatest restaurant in the world.

For foodies making pilgrimages to Britain, the shrine of St John is the equivalent of Santiago de Compostela for those hungry for soul food.

I've been coming to St John since 1994 when Fergus Henderson and Trevor Gulliver converted this derelict former smoke house in Smithfield.

The passion for farmers' markets and seasonal ingredients owes much to St John.

And those restaurants are hugely improved by copying St John.

Restaurant review: St John, London EC1 | Life and style | The ...

There are few parts of the animal, from intestines to marrow bones, that haven't found their way on to a plate at St John.

Jay Rayner pens a love letter to a champion of the British farmyard St John Address: 26 St John Street, London EC1 Telephone:020 7251 0848 Meal For Two, including wine and service: £110 If ever I doubted the degree to which my emotional responses are governed by what I eat, I needed only to examine my feelings about the roast bone marrow with sourdough toast that I was served at St John.

As I ate this it occurred to me that, while I had used St John as a reference point for many other reviews, I have never written about St John itself.

From the moment self-trained chef Fergus Henderson opened his restaurant in 1994, in a converted smokehouse in Clerkenwell, St John became a cult.

Other dishes, like a boozy hare broth - essentially an unclarified consomme - loaded with mushrooms, strike me as being the British equivalent of French paysanne food.