Midcentury cool: the astere dining room
(Picture: Press handout)Excellent restaurant bread is now so commonplace that I rarely devote many words to it. Practically everyone is serving gorgeously burnished loaves made on-site; just as many are folding recherché ingredients into accompanying quenelles of whipped butter. I have thought, on more than one occasion, of a slightly altered version of Martin Amis’s famous line from Money about his protagonist’s chain-smoking: unless I specifically inform you otherwise, there’s always a basket of house sourdough at the table.
At Elis in Bethnal Green, however, the bread demands attention. Order it at this place — an all-new adjunct to Da Terra, Brazilian-Italian chef Rafael Cagali’s two Michelin-starred flagship in the Town Hall Hotel — and you’ll get a whole table-hogging production: a trio of fatty accompaniments (not just a pale, ragged dollop of cultured butter but also a saucer of gooey stracciatella cheese, plus high-grade Gonnelli olive oil) flanking a bowl of springy focaccia, trencher-thick seeded sourdough, and warm pao de queijo, the airy, slightly sweet cheese bun that is probably Brazil’s contribution to the Mount Rushmore of wildly-underrated baked goods.
Such introductory fiddliness and exuberance speaks to the broader approach here. But if you like Cagali’s newest venture — and, for the most part, I very much did — then I think it will be because of this sense of Latin-inflected, off-kilter abundance and almost domestic warmth. Though of course any homeliness here is the sort that has been carefully created with an enormous budget. Elis (named after both Bossa nova artist Elis Regina and a restaurant Cagali’s mother used to run in their native São Paulo) sits on the first floor of the hotel. Up beyond the high-gloss, expensively fragranced art deco lobby, it is a midcentury swank, modish little side room of mismatched, municipal light fittings, black and white photos and sprightly background jazz.
Pao de queijo is probably Brazil’s contribution to the Mount Rushmore of wildly-underrated baked goods
I arrived for an early dinner at around 6pm, conspicuously the only diner in the room for quite a long time. Thankfully the food brought the warmth that the room lacked. Not just those breads — though the pao de queijo did cause my mate Chris, once he finally arrived, to let out a kind of muffled pleasure-gasp as he bit into one — but the other sharing plates from a tightly edited menu. Porchetta tonnata was rumpled, pale-pink slices of ham in the subtle surf of a fishy mayo. Bolinhos de bacalhau (or salt fish croquettes) were plump, golden-fried barrels. Mackerel, interspersed with bergamot-dressed fennel, left very rare and blowtorched to bubbled crispness, introduced an almost Japanese clarity and elegance. And then, to round it all out, there was monkfish tail in black tucupi glaze, with edible flowers and a silky bed of okra-studded haricot beans. A hug on a plate, but one from someone wearing haute couture.
This is not to say that all the kitchen’s attempts at cost-conscious informality are always successful. Short rib rigatoni was passable (and respectably vast for £17) yet mostly memorable for its unusual hit of vinegar. That monkfish came with some fun unbilled sides but, in an atypical moment of meanness, one of them was just two lonely cassava fries. These moments felt to me like Cagali and his team acclimatising to a world away from the controlled pacing of a tasting menu and, more generally, probing for the correct sweet spot between relaxed hotel bar and destination restaurant. Though having said that, any quibbles at our table melted away at the arrival of dulce de leite doughnuts: breaths of magic that had a nudge of sweetness without being cloying. Elis, fittingly for a venture named after a musician, may still be tweaking its levels. But Cagali’s slightly remixed tune is, to my mind, definitely deserving of a bigger crowd.
