Showcase of skill: Juliets Café and Bar
(Picture: Matt Writtle)Juliets Quality Foods has long felt like the one that got away. In the jittery, Wuhan-watching weeks of late February 2020, I nipped into this Tooting café for a pretty good lunch — of swooping folded eggs, and a vast cracked frisbee of Anzac biscuit — that would, in theory, form the basis of a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency review, should this virus thing inconvenience us all for the predicted handful of weeks.
You know how the rest played out. The resulting column, alongside all those cruise ship holiday guides, never ran. Which meant my steady appreciation for this place felt like a sort of burning, undeclared crush. And so, when I planned a trip to Juliets Café and Bar — the spin-off opening from the same team, within Clapham gallery Studio Voltaire — I expected another pleasant brunch and a bit of closure. What I didn’t expect was a fully fledged, wildly ambitious restaurant that may be one of my favourite new spots in the capital.
Right away, it appeared to be an unusually harmonious match between food partner and venue. Set a short walk (and an absolute universe) from mythic meat-market Infernos, Studio Voltaire’s sparkling, bright main complex lies beyond a tranquil courtyard where traffic noise dwindles to a murmur, the fountain gently burbles and, lately, outdoor tables of natural wine-drinking Claphamites have been spilling out onto the pavement. The little Juliets counter faces a roomy lobby space of long communal tables, dotted here and there with plasticine-hued vases by artist James Shaw. There is an appealing shop of purchasable work, where — as I learned, after taking the kids for my second visit — you may have cause to hurriedly hustle a five-year-old away from some reappropriated Nineties erotica.
In art terms, the food, from Australian-raised chef and founder Julian Porter, is multidisciplinary. Where the original Juliets (named after the hair salon that once occupied their Tooting premises) is perhaps best known for Antipodean brunch maximalism, careful fermentation and making a mad amount of dish components in-house (why have normal banana bread when you could have it mixed with coffee cherry husks, sliced thick as a kerb, and smeared with salted espresso butter?), here they do not mind keeping things simple. Fresh peas arrive with the instruction to “shuck” them and eat with pecorino; gorgeously hot, fresh-fried panisse are scattered with flowering thyme, a thin scrim of crispness giving way to judiciously seasoned gooey middles; ham and melon is somehow much more than the sum of its parts: canoes of golden-fleshed honeymoon, draped in oil-dribbled sheafs of coppa and gone in a couple of salty-sweet mouthfuls.
This was more vibe-setting than cooking. But as things got more complicated — as I tried puffy broad bean fritters set in a tangy housemade Bengali tomato pickle plus, on another occasion, a slumped cut of lamb, slow-braised to spoonable, wibbling softness, and served with flageolet beans in a subtle bagna cauda — the confidence did not dip.
True, the kitchen-sink approach to flavour-building can run into trouble — I’m thinking here of the saltiness of sourdough bread end waffles which, without the balancing influence of honey parfait, can confuse the mouth. But this iteration of Juliets (opening a decade after Milk, the Balham café that, before they stepped away in 2020, was Porter and his partner Lauren Johns’s first venture) feels like a showcase for years of skill; a joyful sanctuary that just wants to tempt you with cake, pour you something cold and facilitate a good time. Set in beguiling premises and animated by dishes with a blindsiding mastery, the new Juliets feels like the best sort of tucked-away, neighbourhood secret.
