The John Salt - review

I booked the John Salt after reading Fay Maschler’s great review of Neil Rankin’s cooking and, for various reasons, ended up inviting my Dad to come with me.  I then read a few more reviews and realised that it sounded as if nobody in the whole world would hate the place more than him.  I mean, if I wrote a list called ‘Things my Father doesn’t like’ the stuff I was reading about – trestle tables, concepts, aggressively loud music, chillies, ‘bacon panna cotta', on trend barbecue, Islington... – would all feature quite prominently.  My fears were not allayed by an email I received telling me he didn’t recognise anything on the wine list, which is not good given he’s Rain Man for wine.  (I think Maschler’s review had also mentioned a pub style wine list, so this may well be set to expand).   Off we went anyway, and I was pleasantly surprised by his initial reaction to the place; apparently it looks like In De Wulf, a restaurant in Belgium. So there you go. For our purposes, it’s big and industrially bare but warmed up with nice lighting and flowers on the tables.

We ordered some Chablis which was delicious and decided to share 3 starters: crab and fennel on pig skin, raw beef with pear and sesame, and cod with foie gras and orange tempura.  The cod was very good; served warm against a cool foie gras sauce, it was genuinely innovative.  The crab and fennel were in a mayonnaise and sat on top of a giant, properly crispy pork scratching.  This was also great.  The raw beef was Japanese in spirit, and prickled with chilli.  Now, I like chilli, but you couldn’t really taste the pear or sesame, and as Dad pointed out, you might write ‘chilli’ in the description on the menu.  Still, minor niggle, they were a good combination of starters, the room was buzzy, the wine was flowing and both father and daughter were in benign good humour.

We’d ordered green chilli poussin, skirt steak with kimchi hollandaise, fries and a green salad to share.  We didn’t see any of it for quite a long time; enough time almost to get through the second bottle of Chablis and begin chatting to the people next to us (who were also waiting a very long time for their drinks).  When it finally arrived, the skirt steak was cold, as were the chips.  The steak in particular was stone cold, and not with the curled, crisp edges of something that has been sitting on the pass for too long: the meat had been beautifully treated, it was just cold.  Very odd.  We ate a bit of it with the hollandaise, and then stopped.  The poussin was great; very tender.  Green chillies layered the top it, which was bronzed from a honey glaze.  It was warm, but I think that was more to do with the fact that it was whole, rather than that it had got to us any more quickly.   As soon as the waitress came back, we mentioned it to her.  Well, Dad mentioned it, I’m a bit rubbish at that sort of thing. Vidkun Quisling, Dad sometimes likes to call me.  It’s something to do with collaboration.  The waitress was charming, thanked us for the feedback and said she’d relay it to the kitchen.  Price wise, it came to £145, but it turns out that the oh so delicious Chablis was £40 a bottle, which I would not have ordered with my mates, so you could do it for much less.

 

It’s a shame because the food has genuine sparkles of something really creative, and the atmosphere as a whole is fantastic.  I’m not sure what the problem was that evening, or where it had happened along the line, but something wasn’t right in the timings between the kitchen and us.   If the creases iron out, and I lived in Islington, I'd be very happy to have this nearby, but as it stands I'll keep closer to home and wish them luck. 

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