Tuesday 3 July 2012

Tramshed - review

Today, on Tuesday 3rd July, I was forced to take my winter coat out of hibernation. However, a few weeks ago it was so sunny that my friend and I drank a bottle of Pinot Grigio in the sunshine after work and went to Shoreditch for supper.

The East End is not my haunt. I’m not edgy enough. I’m always overdressed. Past the shiny buildings of Commercial Street, beyond the higgle piggle of Brick Lane and through the laboured regeneration of Spitalfields Market, I feel an aura of menace. It’s competitive cool jarring rudely with corporate money and real hardship. I suppose that’s the appeal. I just find it vaguely exhausting.

I have tried. I did Galvin La Chapelle and thought ‘wouldn’t this be nice if it was in the West End’, I went on the Jack the Ripper tour and thought ‘I can really see why he chose this alleyway as his stomping ground’, You name it, I’ve done it. Birthday drinks in achingly hip Hoxton bars, wine tasting in Shoreditch, numerous authentic curry trips, clubs in nameless archways…I have even eaten raclette at 11pm in a deserted and strip lit Spitalfields Market. And most of the time I have just thought ‘how the f**k am I going to get home from here?’.

So there you have it. Confession over, I’m not cool enough for the East. However, if ever there was a reason to gird my loins and head back over, it was for Tramshed. Tramshed is the latest Mark Hix restaurant, which is following the current vogue for minimalistic menus (my favourite so far: ‘Bubbledogs’, serving hot dogs and champagne - opening this month) and only serves chicken or steak. My friend and I were convinced the chicken would be the joke order. Who would order chicken over steak? However, as the night of our reservation (hooray) due nearer, we read increasingly hyperbolic reviews of the chicken at Tramshed, and decided to go for one steak and one chicken on the evening itself.

The restaurant is on Rivington Street in a tram electricity generation shed (or something). It is massive and noisy and looks like a canteen. In the middle is a ginormous, raised Damien Hirst sculpture of a bull with a chicken on its back in formaldehyde. Each to their own. I don’t think I’m cool enough for Damien Hirst either. That aside, the atmosphere is buzzy, informal, and the perfect place for taking 5 friends and getting seriously pissed at the long trestle tables down the centre of the room.

The menu really is as simple as chicken or steak. There are sides, but the starters are salads (served as a mix of 3 plates for the whole table at £8 each) so I wouldn’t bother with them. My friend chose the wine as she was about to go on a wine tasting course and wanted to flex her vinicultural muscles. It was good and red and reasonably priced. The starter salads were crisp and sharp, although the gigantic Yorkshire pudding with horseradish sauce was obviously finished first.

We had ordered a small chicken and a small steak and, excited by the prospect of the superlative chicken, dug into that first. Well…. it was just chicken. I can see if you’re eating battery chickens (which you shouldn’t be) then perhaps this would be very different, but it was just a roast chicken. Good, but a chicken. I am not terribly excited by chickens. What was exciting was the steak, which I thought was faultless, as were the crispy, beef dripping, fries. The table of cheery men next to us, who drank flaming cocktails throughout dinner, had eschewed the chicken altogether and gone for a giant slab of steak with chips and salad. They had clearly been here before.

We got out for £40 a head which I think is great value given you can drop that at most high street chains on a weekend evening. The crowd was cool (natch), the service was great, some of the food really excellent and we had a fab evening.

The ‘how the f**k do we get home from here?’ moment only happened as we tottered through the rain into the smudgy, shadowy glow of the nearest bar, took one look at the menu (presented as the pull out lyric sheet in an old cassette case) and legged it to the nearest taxi.

Tramshed http://www.chickenandsteak.co.uk/