Much as I always want to go to the restaurants in this column more than once before reviewing, the ones that get the double visit treatment tend to fall into established categories. Sometimes it is that I wasn’t able to put a useful enough dent in an enormous menu. Sometimes it is a hunch that lunchtime and dinner services are so different that they both need to be assessed. Occasionally, like those Londoners whose weekends involve nipple clamps and safe words, it is because I have an apparent kink for repeating the same painful experience all over again.
But every now and then, as at Saltine in Highbury, the thing that has me hurrying back can be explained as nothing more complex than pure, animal greed. Did I, after one lunch, have a decent enough sense of the cooking and beguiling thrum in its crisp, partially glass-ceilinged dining room? Almost certainly. Nonetheless, I found I had to have another confirmatory hit. And that probably tells you everything you need to know about this wonderfully-composed sneak-attack of a neighbourhood hit.
