“Wine-led sharing-plates restaurant”. They are innocuous, omnipresent words, but they can cause even the most determinedly optimistic of diners to emit a low groan and pinch the bridge of their noses like weary TV detectives. Because you can see it all already, can’t you? You can see the little dish of Gordal olives and the neat shoal of Cantabrian anchovies adrift in a pool of golden oil; you can see the back-troubling bar stools cast in flickering candlelight and the rows of irreverently labelled skin-contact wines called things like Juicy Bastard. It can feel like a kind of human-initiated AI; a digitally flattened, copycat environment where, from Malmö to Melbourne, restaurateurs of a certain age are all endlessly extrapolating on the same half-a-dozen previously successful ideas and motifs.
However, at Sune — a new Broadway Market spot from married hospitality veterans Honey Spencer and Charlie Sims, plus head chef Michael Robins — they have taken this potentially hackneyed (and undoubtedly Hackneyed) premise and done something truly noteworthy with it. Partly it is the atmosphere, the detail and the welcome — the fact that Spencer and Sims have taken some of the rigorous, gently clairvoyant service principles of the restaurants on their illustrious combined CV (Noma, Lyles, Mãos) and transposed them to a soaring little, sun-flooded room beside the Regent’s Canal. But mostly, though, Sune (which is pronounced “sooner” and comes from the Old Nordic word for son) is a project conceived as something of an antidote to “chef-led” pretentiousness.
