The thing about immensely talented chefs is that they cannot help themselves. I am not talking, in this instance, about any accusations of off-duty misbehaviour that might give this newspaper’s lawyers cause for concern. No, what I’m referring to is those chefs that tend to bring a wild-eyed meticulousness to bear on even the most outwardly banal of culinary projects. At its worst, it is a phenomenon that gives us fiddly “deconstructions” that are technically impressive but lack the brutish, simple genius of the original.
But at its best, I think this tendency may also be directly responsible for somewhere like Story Cellar. Ostensibly a Paris-inspired rotisserie chicken spin-off of Tom Sellers’s two Michelin-starred Restaurant Story, this Covent Garden spot is, perhaps, better understood as a fanatically detail-oriented team stacking a careful Jenga tower of elements onto a deceptively basic concept. Is it still just a chicken place if you also do fresh pasta, wood-fired scallops in a strident XO sauce, and end it all with a bread and butter pudding that may genuinely be one of London’s best desserts?
