Sardine

Homepage of Sardine restaurant in London. Southern French cooking near Angel, Islington & Old street.

Home - Sardine

http://www.sardine.london

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Grace Dent reviews Sardine: A place to break diets | London ...

Review analysis
food   staff  

To this list, I add Sardine on Micawber Street, N1 — an inconspicuous restaurant hiding next to the Victoria Miro gallery, offering southern European home-style cooking between Angel and Old Street tubes.

Southern Europe — in Sardine’s terms — is Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, coastal Catalonia, Provence and Languedoc, some of North Africa, and other places quickly reachable from Gatwick.

At Sardine, he aims to offer the sort of dinners that nanas from the region might cook; salade niçoise, soupe au pistou, fish and meats on beans, tomatoes stuffed with simple things, lamb cooked on the fire.

Sardine is the sort of place to go with good intentions.

A plentiful slice of lamb à la ficelle is possibly Sardine’s signature dish, although I think I preferred the girolles with grilled polenta and spinach, even if it needed a less abstemious helping of crème fraîche to make it truly fly.

Sardine, London N1: 'As Dolly Parton almost said, it takes a lot of ...

Review analysis
food   desserts   drinks   staff  

Where’s the star-chasing skill in sourcing the most beautifully snowy dollop of burrata, weeping cream and wobbly as scrambled egg, then smashing it on top of fine toasted sourdough and scattering it with the reddest, sweetest datterini tomatoes glugged with peppery olive oil?

Turns out that, far from mundane, it’s outlandishly complex: veal and pork spiked with chicken liver, bacon, ricotta, parmesan, chervil, fennel seeds, thyme, black pepper and breadcrumbs soaked in milk, all cooked with white wine, butter, tarragon and cream.

Sardine’s identity is based round the cooking of southern France, but it’s a flexible brief expanded to encompass a kaleidoscope of fresh, vibrant, sun-soaked flavours – a toasty-edged Swiss chard gratin served with beautifully blackened onglet; mullet with pastis; lardo; bottarga; vast, ruby bulls’ heart tomatoes in an uber-Niçoise laced with artichokes.

Even dessert, an apricot and brown butter tart, is no looker – instead of a flourish of the patissier’s art, it’s a slumpy old thing – but it tastes wonderful: nutty and squidgy, its fudginess punctuated by the pleasing sharpness of the softened fruit.

Sardine manages to be contemporary without relying on the ubiquitous millennial restaurant formula (apart from its open kitchen): the design is as fresh as lemon spritz.

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