Nostalgic escape: the bar feels like a teenage ego run riot
(Picture: Adrian Lourie)If you want to feel desired — if you want your phone to buzz repeatedly with messages and check-ins and open-ended pleas for a response — might I suggest an online booking at Valderrama’s on Upper Street in Islington? A few hours after anonymously reserving a table at this new “sports bar like no other”, I had already been contacted multiple times by an extremely keen booking manager. And there was, I thought, something especially telling about the final bit of correspondence.
“Just as a point of reference,” began the text, “there will be football shown in the venue tonight but this should not impact your booking.” That a sports bar would feel the need to warn guests about the presence of live sport felt, to me, to get to the heart of the central predicament of this place. The roar of televised football during a meal can be both gift and curse; either a massive lure or an active deterrent, depending on who you ask. And though Valderrama’s (which is the brainchild of chef James Cochran and essentially a home for Around the Cluck, his hit lockdown-era fried chicken delivery business) is spirited, genially run, and frequently delicious, it does feel, at times, like it is caught between two versions of itself. A kind of half-and-half scarf of a venture, solidly updating rather than boldly reimagining a tricky genre.
