Go by the sheeting rain and it could have been a miserably dreich afternoon in April; look at a calendar and it was a nothing weekday in early November. But if you happened to walk through the doors of The Devonshire last Wednesday lunchtime, then the precise feeling, through a mysterious quirk of space and time, was of stepping into some unholy, simultaneous combination of St Patrick’s Day, New Year’s Eve and the last mobbed Friday night before Christmas.
Every corner of this white-hot, Soho megapub’s soft-lit, wood-panelled interior heaved with guffawing crowds of office workers and home counties theatregoers doomed to miss the start of the Moulin Rouge matinee; massed regiments of Guinness swirled and settled on the bar as former Guinea Grill landlord Oisin Rogers, one component of the supergroup of co-founders responsible for the place, frowned beside an overworked restaurant bookings laptop that might as well have been emanating smoke (next available reservation: late January at a push); later, amid the scrum of pint-hefting bodies and sodden jackets, there was the faintly Hogarthian sight of a squalling baby in a pram.
“The thing is,” began my pal, as we found a scrap of space and tried to make sense of the eye-widening chaos unfurling all around us. “People just really love a good pub.”
This is inarguable. And The Devonshire — a long-simmering, impossible dream of a freehouse and grill restaurant that Rogers and his co-founder, Flat Iron’s Charlie Carroll, have been plotting for almost 10 years — is truly about as good as pubs get. But I don’t think that fully does justice to the strange, special and incredibly specific things that are happening in this capacious, Piccadilly-adjacent former site of a Jamie’s Italian.
The zealous commitment to detail begins with the bread. Having wangled a very late, post-2pm table upstairs in the narrow, curtain-fringed space, dominated by the fiery grimace of a hulking custom wood grill, we were soon tearing at a pair of the pillowy, butter-glossed dinner rolls that are skilfully teased out of metal dishes by roaming servers. They were good on their own but even better (as a passing Rogers suggested) deployed as an absorbent for the puddled juices beneath baked scallops, crisped lardons of bacon and a sharp dousing of malt vinegar.
There is a revelatory elegance and restraint to that combination; a wink towards chippy teas and scallop and bacon baps. And that sense of play, control and deceptive minimalism is all across the curlicued, handwritten menu that executive chef Ashley Palmer-Watts has been working on since February. Wouldn’t it be fun if we brushed house-butchered rib-eye steaks and lamb chops with the rendered fat from other aged cuts, and cooked them to buttery, campfire-scented softness over wood? What if the chips were lacy, golden marvels, fried in duck fat? And wouldn’t it be a laugh to turn a dish of slow-roasted, buttered carrot nubbins into the delirious, richly caramelised proof of the existence of a higher power?
Most of the dishes at The Devonshire answer all these hypotheticals and pack rigour, mischief and joyfulness into every bite.
If there were slight blots then they came in the form of a pleasant confit tomato tart starter scuppered by somewhat unyielding pastry, and a creamed leek side dish where pointed old school subtlety had edged slightly towards domestic half-heartedness. But I will say that it was very early days. And also that, once more people have visited (thankfully, the race is on to open the larger, second floor dining room before the end of the year), they will realise that it isn’t really a place where minor disappointments can get much purchase. Particularly by the time a weightless scoop of chocolate mousse, cleverly sprinkled with crunchable slivers of chocolate, has been set before you.
Most of the dishes at The Devonshire... pack rigour, mischief and joyfulness into every bite.
We ended back downstairs, having one last perfect Guinness and, similarly to the crowds, not quite able to leave the warm, cocooning light of a main bar that seems to have ever-disappearing exits and its own tractor beam.
The Devonshire is both breathtakingly vast and mystically intimate; determinedly old-fashioned yet not remotely stuffy. It takes the decades-long experience, twinkling, cult-leader charisma and detail-oriented romanticism of its founding team and turns it into something that registers as a kind of intangible magic. Yes, it really is just another pub. But, my goodness, it is also so much more than that.
