The Warwick pub in Soho is one of those places that, although only hazily remembered in any material sense, feels acutely redolent of my formative working years in London. These were the dank, weirdly featureless chain bars that other junior writers and I would duck into for watery pints of Staropramen; the noisy waypoint between the press party canapé dinners we all basically subsisted on, and a costly snooze on a Southeastern train to Zone 4.
I cannot think of losing my very first magazine job at 22 — and feeling that I was professionally finished and would probably have to go back to working at the Bluewater H&M — without also thinking of The Green Man on Berwick Street, a splayed packet of Nobby’s Nuts, and the not especially consoling roar of Champions League football on the telly.
Why am I starting with this? Well, partly for closure in relation to that first firing. But also, more specifically, I am probably trying to put my determination to accentuate the positives at Nessa — the amiable new all-day affair that now sits on The Warwick’s old Brewer Street site — into context. Yes, there were some issues with the execution of chef Tom Cenci’s playfully indulgent modern British dishes. Yes, you could also say that this pleasure-forward bistro, a place of ersatz sausage and egg McMuffins and high-grade jam roly poly, occasionally gets lost in the sauce of its own nostalgia. But lots of it is very impressive and preferable to the kind of thing that would have thrived here not that long ago.
Much of this starts with the sure-footedness of the room and the broader project. Conceived by Mortimer House founder Guy Ivesha, Nessa (which, rather than a tribute to Ruth Jones’s Gavin & Stacey character, is in fact named after Virginia Woolf’s sister, the Bloomsbury Group artist and proto-polyamorist Vanessa Bell) is just the public-facing component of a members-only, six-storey stack of workspaces, bars and rooftop views called 1 Warwick. You enter through a Soho House-ish bar with soft, magic-hour lighting, and drift through to a main dining room characterised by the gleaming theatre of an open kitchen, tumbling greenery and pink banquette sofas.
Cheese and onion croquettes, with an oddly bruise-coloured grape mustard mayo, might be some of the best I’ve ever had
Cenci, who has worked at Duck and Waffle and more recently launched The Loyal Tavern in Bermondsey, leans heavily into the comfort cued by that seating. Housemade BBQ spiced crisps carried the sense memory of Pringles with perhaps an even more pronounced narcotic high; wood-fired leeks were lent crunch and vigour by candied pecans, and the cheese and onion croquettes, with an oddly bruise-coloured grape mustard mayo, might be some of the best I’ve ever had.
It was probably around the ostensible mains (the menu, in line with modern restaurant law, is actually split into shareable “snacks” and “vegetables”, plus “small plates” and “large plates”) that things got a bit more muddled. Carbonara made with twirlable strands of celeriac will not keep pasta manufacturers awake at night. The meat in a lavish Chicken Cordon Bleu had seized up a bit, despite its ravishing bed of scorched monksbeard, celery and green olive in a gluggable broth. “It just feels like a very strange collection of things thrown together,” said my mate.
There is a similar exuberance to the drinks — there is a redcurrant-laced spritz cocktail but we had excellent beers from Forest Road Brewing in proper chilled glasses — and a 15-tog comfort blanket of a dessert menu that I almost wanted to frame. True, the high quantity of suet in that gooseberry jam roly poly with bay leaf custard gave it an unwelcome backnote of sausage roll. But it was hard to stay angry when there was also a Nessabocker Glory, with pretzel chunks, drizzled salted caramel and rum-soaked raisins. Nessa charms, it satisfies and, on the site of somewhere that typified London at its most forgettable, it puts something artful, distinct and generous-spirited into the world.
