Cloth, a hot, hyped restaurant near Smithfield Market and just behind St Bartholomew’s church in central London, does not open at all at weekends, but, unusually in hospitality these days, it is open on Mondays, as well as every day through to Friday. It sets out this fact pleasingly plainly on its website. Cloth’s clarity on this matter is refreshing, because, despite my job as a restaurant critic, it seems I spend far less time eating out than I do barking at my laptop about this trend to be cagey, opaque and mostly shut. “But when are you actually open?” I regularly find myself quacking. “When, when, when?”
The modern, cool restaurant, you see, prefers to offer page after online page of TS Eliot-style tracts about the chef’s culinary journey and the restaurant’s attitudes to biodiverse composting, with no mention at all of what point in the week they switch on the stoves, which often turns out to be around Thursday lunchtime. At Cloth, however, you very much get the feeling that they are sweeping away all that nonsense and leaving behind the bare bones of good, modern British hospitality. Namely: a table, a great glass or two of wine, and an interesting, hearty, ever-changing menu featuring duck terrine with pickled walnut, comte tart, monkfish with Cornish mussels and sea beet, Amalfi lemon tart and a heavenly chocolate mousse with salted caramel ice-cream.
