Pidgin

Pidgin is a restaurant in Hackney, east London, serving a set four-course menu that, along with wines and cocktails, changes every week.

Pidgin | A London Restaurant

http://pidginlondon.com

Pidgin, London

Pidgin | East London | Restaurant Reviews | Hot Dinners

Pidgin, London: restaurant review | olive magazine - olive magazine

Potato sourdough and butter is followed by two small dishes – pork fat and peas, and octopus and apple with peppery nasturtiums and a creamy almond milk dressing.

The pork fat, a tiny piece of sourdough topped with whipped lardo, fresh-tasting English peas, and a punchy chilli vinaigrette, was delicious, although it could have been twice the size.

The light, sweet twist on panzanella for dessert was excellent – fresh strawberries and melt-in-the-mouth pieces of fennel brioche, with Thai basil and refreshing olive oil ice cream to lift the dish.

The glass-fronted restaurant is a small and cosy room with a real neighbourhood feel, packed with stylish slate, copper-rimmed tables and wooden chairs.

The attention to detail, from the informed and friendly staff to the stylish copper menu holders and tiny handmade butter dishes, engraved with the restaurant’s name.

Pidgin London review

This much I know.

“Still or sparkling?”

“Er, tap?”

“It is tap.

Still or sparkling tap.”

Pidgin, London E8 – restaurant review | Marina O'Loughlin | Life and ...

In the restaurant business, there are bad amateurs and good amateurs.

It’s into this latter category that I’d put the people behind Pidgin: James Ramsden and Sam Herlihy (neither trained in the restaurant business, but with a successful supperclub under their belts), alongside Elizabeth Allen in the kitchen.

Allen’s most recent gig was at Neil Rankin’s ballsy Smokehouse in Islington; she’s staged at L’Enclume and has a love for Asian flavours – miso, sake lees, shiso, dashi.

At a time when many chefs think they need to dial flavours up to 11, the subtlety here is sexy: seductive interplay between textures, various degrees of nuttiness, including what looks alarmingly maggoty but turns out to be clever – puffed wild rice.

The individual components are odd – super-sweet burnt white chocolate ice-cream tasting like Scottish tablet (no bad thing, in my book), an airy and vaguely medicinal parsley and pistachio cake, cheek-squeezingly sharp raspberry powder – but, eaten together, they suddenly make glorious, harmonious sense.

2017's best restaurant – Pidgin, east London | Life and style | The ...

When the public ballot opened for this year’s Best Restaurant, James Ramsden sent a tweet to his then near-17,000 followers: “If you vote for Pidgin in the #ofmawards I’ll personally empty your dishwasher.”

I mean, it’s a bit of a weird thing to do, to call me up and say …” “I don’t think it’s weird at all,” interjects Sam Herlihy, partner in Pidgin and their new restaurant Magpie.

The most popular restaurants tended to be very regionally specific: Ramsden, Herlihy and their head chef Dan Graham, meanwhile, loved exotic ingredients they’d read about on obscure food blogs.

Graham, previously a sous chef, took over behind the stove around the same time and OFM’s Best Restaurant award – previously won by The Palomar in 2015 and last year by Barrafina, Adelaide Street – is proof that Pidgin continues to delight.

Such relentless creativity is a lot to ask from a chef and it is perhaps revealing that Allen (who will open her own restaurant, Shibui, next year after her baby is born) and Graham took circuitous paths to cooking: both in fact, coincidentally, trained as architects.

Pidgin | Restaurants in Hackney, London

Supper clubs are great.

Hosted by the type of people who understand that there’s more to dining out than just food (if there wasn’t, we’d all be at home eating takeaway), they blazed a trail for laid-back dining and short, no-choice menus.

It’s like being at a great dinner party, the sort where you trust the host’s cooking, drink shots and don’t talk about house prices.

The first foray into ‘proper restaurant-hood’ from James Ramsden and Sam Herlihy, creators of the acclaimed supper club Secret Larder, it translates the best of these qualities – stress-free menu, vibrant atmosphere – into a cute space, with copper-trimmed tables, walls bearing twigs gathered in the New Forest, and a seascape-papered loo complete with the sound of crashing thunder.

Dinner parties are dead.