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Brat, London E1, restaurant review: prog rock, or a very palpable hit?
food
It’s not often we’re really, startlingly, breathlessly up-to-the-minute, tumbling out of a taxi to review a brand new restaurant whose soft launch has barely hardened, needing to beg a PR for a table so we’re not sure whether we’ll be feted like visiting potentates or hosed down with dishwater, then hairdryered with verbal abuse.
But Brat is news, or what passes for news round here: a long-awaited and often-rumoured new project by fancied chef Tomos Parry, previously of Kitty Fisher’s in Mayfair.
This is, or looks like (I’ve never been) an unexpected rarity in central London: a genuinely posh restaurant – not luxurious, not grand, but squarely tailored to that precise social latitude where haute bourgeoisie meets déclassé aristocracy.
At first glance, Brat seems cut from a different cloth – though it’s on the first floor of a decommissioned strip club, upstairs from The Smoking Goat, which we wrote about here in February; but like their downstairs neighbour – and unlike, say, Bodega Negra in Soho – they’re studiously avoiding any allusion to the building’s seedy past.