Eating out: St Johns Bar and Restaurant, London
It’s always reassuring when your boyfriend gets your birthday present exactly right. As well as a beautiful set of Falcon pie dishes, Karl treated me to lunch at St John’s – a great restaurant near Smithfield market, which I’d been wanting to try out but never actually mentioned to him.
Despite mains being around the £20 mark, St John’s is completely unpretentious. It’s small and fairly unassuming from the outside - in fact, in doesn’t look like a restaurant at all. Inside is a small bar area and some seating for those wanting casual drinks and snacks. And to the side is a little staircase, which we almost missed, leading to the dining room. This is like a slightly posh school canteen, with low hanging lights, dull cream coloured walls, plain dark wood chairs, white paper tablecloths (over proper linen ones, though), and what looks like coathooks running along the walls. You can see part of the kitchen, and although we’ve arrived in the middle of a busy Sunday lunchtime service, it didn’t sound manic or stressed. The dining room itself was buzzing with casual chatter, and everyone was tucking into incredible looking food.
Which brings me to the menu. So, to me St Johns has always been about meat, specifically offal. I can’t claim to be a huge lover of offal, and there isn’t actually much that I’ve tried apart from liver, and that’s precisely the reason I wanted to come here. I figure if you’re going to eat some weird animal innards, you might as well do it in a place known for cooking it exceptionally well. A few years ago Karl tried tinned lambs brain (cold) and almost retched. This is not the correct way to approach offal.
It’s worth mentioning that St John’s also offers seafood, vegetarian and non-offal meat dishes, so if you’re an offal-hater don’t think let any of the above put you off trying it out. The menu changes daily.
St John’s politely requests that you don’t use your mobile phone during your meal, so I have no photos of any dishes and if I say something is delicious you’ll just have to take my word for it.
To start, I chose the salt hake with potatoes, rocket and aioli. The fish was soft and salty, and everything was coated in a well seasoned, pale yellow aioli, and dotted with capers. Despite having such strong flavours, it was surprisingly fresh-tasting.
Karl went for the roast bone marrow, one of the starters that St Johns is perhaps best known for. It comes as four short chunks of bone, filled with gooey marrow that you scoop out with the little scraper utensil they provide. You spread this on some lightly toasted bread, sprinkle over a little salt and top it with a few parsley leaves, wafer thin slices of onion and a caper or two. Ooo it’s divine. Soft and gooey, a little greasy, very rich – it needed the garnish. We’d definitely get it again.
My choice of main was venison liver and ‘a cheeky bit of kidney’, served with chunks of beetroot. The liver was beautifully cooked and again very rich, but the beetroot did a great job of countering this. The kidney I wasn’t so fussed on. It didn’t taste bad, it just didn’t taste particularly interesting, and I left half.
Karl went for lamb sweetbread (very brave, I thought), which came with peas and bacon in a thin stew. The meat was super soft, almost melt in your mouth, the peas were a little minty and the bacon added another flavour hit. We had a side of greens too, very simply cooked and seasoned, which added a bit of freshness to both our dishes. Overall, Karl’s main was probably better than mine just because of the variety of different ingredients and flavours. Where every one of my mouthfuls was exactly the same (liver and beetroot, beetroot and liver), Karl’s had a bit more interest.
Despite being almost full to bursting, watching other people being served their desserts meant that missing this course out just wasn’t an option. From some sly sideways glances across the room, we knew what we wanted without having to look at the menu. Karl had a strawberry fool – strawberries and thick cream, served with french toast. And I ordered the apricot jelly with whipped cream. Doesn’t sound much, but this was perhaps the best jelly I’ve ever had (even better than the Bompas & Parr gin and lemon!). Fruity and tangy, super yummy with a bit of cream on the side. There was a whole poached apricot too, and a thin citrus-flavoured biscuit. Most interesting pud I’ve had in a while. In fact, most interesting lunch out I’ve had in a while.
Afterwards we strolled down to the One New Change shopping mall, where you can enjoy stunning views across London from the roof terrace. London rocks.
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