Review at a glance: ★★★☆☆
As any couple might attest, length is a matter of debate. I wonder if you can think of an example? But here’s another: long lunches. You know the sort: pub beforehand, late arrival, Champagne to start. Bread, butter, ballast. Bottle of white. Food either the entire menu or nothing really at all. Gossip. Bottle of red. Make it two. Cheese, pudding wine if they’ve got it. Coffee as strong as cocaine. Mutual enemies slated. Everyone declaring undying love for cigarettes but ignoring their phones as threats of divorce begin pinging in. “Lunch was good, wasn’t it?” someone will say. “Wasn’t it just,” someone will reply. “What did we have again?” Carriages at midnight, ambulances at three.
And so to the Yellow Bittern, a new Irish-British bistro open only for lunch, specifically lengthy, boozy ones. A strict pair of sittings: at noon (ours), and again at 2pm. Two hours? For a long lunch? I won’t play “mine’s-bigger-than-his” but come the f*** on. Absolute amateurs.
Fortunately, everything else has promise. Name’s good, the Yellow Bittern being the bird who died for want of a drink in an Irish elegiac. A little poetry befits a place that is also a bookshop: in the window are titles from Arabella Boxer and Keith Floyd; downstairs are things like Tony Armstrong Jones’s London, likely here as his daughter Frances is the co-owner. She also waits tables disarmingly. The other owner is the chef, Hugh Corcoran, Belfast-born but Basque and Paris trained.
Inside is wood-panelled with tables under white paper tablecloths and treacherously close together. Nice prints on the butter yellow walls: in one Samuel Beckett, skin like a ploughed field, babies half a Guinness. Perhaps he would have liked it here. No Guinness, but one barrel of dark ale (why not Double Diamond?) measured out by the half, sat on the counter beside stacked Le Creusets. In front of these is an accordion lying hungover on its side. The Bittern does not take cards, and bookings are by telephone or letter only. There’s hope for the telegram yet.
Are you noticing it’s all not quite of this century? There is an unsettling sense that this is a place of make-believe, or perhaps 1982 (my favourite of the years in which I wasn’t yet born). A doorway to life before everyone dulled.
It offers the requisite sense of mischief without the ruinous side effects. I did not miss any trains, or wake with a head in the vice of dehydration
Corcoran plays the proprietor part beautifully, right down to his vintage gold watch and opening gambit: “Now, would you like a drink?” We would. Not that there’s a menu for this. Instead, describe your wants and he’ll offer choice. The fiancée and I are simple folk — nothing but the finest white Burgundy, please — so hardly presented a challenge. Still, he delivered: an organic Chardonnay, the steely sort, barely twice what you’d pay in the shops (practically free in restaurant terms). House red later on worked, too, as it tends to.
Food? It had a touch of the 1982s as well. I have a hunch most readers know what very good leek and potato soup tastes like, likewise a plate of radishes, carrots and olives with a hard-boiled egg. The potential of the kid goat pâté was only realised with a heavy sprinkling of the salt on the table. Mains were limited to a choice of two: steak, kidney and ale stew, or a guinea fowl pie with a thick suet crust, plenty of bacon and excellent leeks. Good, but still wanting the salt. An ordered green salad did not materialise, as if offered for show. But I liked that, we do it at home — put a few morbid leaves out for our good conscience and then promptly ignore them.
If this is a long lunch place then it is one with training wheels. It offers the requisite sense of mischief without the ruinous side effects. I did not miss any trains, or wake with a head in the vice of dehydration. Twiggy didn’t chuck me out. I loved it here, adored it. So why three stars? I can’t with a straight face say somewhere with sometimes middling food, no wine list and barely any choice (almost none if you’re a solo diner, or a veggie), that only takes cash, is worth four or five stars. Sure, that’s its reason for being. I get it. But you might not. I’m off for a fag. And a 2pm booking.
Meal for two, about £140. 20 Caledonian Road, N1 9DU, 020 3342 2162
Amuse-bouche: Help the homeless for a £1
From now until the end of the year, the charity StreetSmart will be operating in more than 600 restaurants across the capital, including St John, Julie’s and the River Café. StreetSmart raises money to support the homeless simply by asking restaurants to add an entirely voluntary £1 to diners’ bills, an addition that costs the restaurants nothing and the diner, well, a quid. And not even every diner, as the £1 is per table, not per person. Sponsorship from LandAid ensures every single penny raised goes to those in need; nothing is wasted on admin. With London homelessness up 33 per cent this year on last, and the highest it’s been in a decade, this is clearly essential. Help if you can.
For more information, head here.
