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.
