Made in Manhattan, Remade in London
Hester van Hensbergen reviews One Club Row, Dove and a new British take on the New York brasserie. Photography by Michaël Protin.
Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. Today’s review is by Hester van Hensbergen on a new generation of New York City inspired restaurants in London.
Issue 1 of our magazine is now back in stock and you can order through our website here. If you would like to stock it at your shop or restaurant, please order via our distributor Antenne Books by emailing maxine@antennebooks.com and mia@antennebooks.com
The cartoonish green waft of Manhattan garbage must have caught a drift on a strong westerly wind because, in London’s restaurants, it’s beginning to smell a lot like a New York summer. There are West Village burgers selling out nightly in Notting Hill, USDA-approved rib-eyes hitting the tables in Mayfair, and soon enough sliders will be joining the finger sandwiches at Claridge’s for the season. Aspiring restaurant magnates are taking their cues from Keith McNally, the legendary (British) proprietor of Odeon and Balthazar, who – though he says he regrets almost everything – has been hugely influential in shaping his adopted American city’s restaurant culture. In other words, NYC dining is everywhere right now. And nowhere is warbling New York, New York at the top of its lungs quite like the place I chose for dinner – down an alley that looks like a sitcom set, under an electric blue awning, up a narrow flight of stairs and through the heavy curtains of the newest New York brasserie: Shoreditch’s One Club Row.
Before getting to that, though, we need to define New York cuisine. Attempting to identify a unitary, exportable culture for such a huge city shaped by centuries of migration might seem counterintuitive, just as it would be for London. But actually, London does have a distinct culinary scene that it projects to the world: quality British ingredients, simply seasoned and cooked, often with a Tamworth or Middlewhite pig involved along the way, and served in spartan white dining rooms. The same is true, but differently so, for New York. There, the mood is grand, European, mid-century.
It’s “like fake French”, says J Lee, the Contributing Food Editor at Interview. NYC cuisine isn’t seasonally focused in the way London cooking is. “It’s asparagus all year long,” says Becca Forman, a long-time NYC server. The city’s menu follows a fixed formula: “There are oysters, tartar, crudo, a burger, martinis. Big table salad.” Maybe there’s crab, probably Crab Louie. Meat course, it’s duck, steak, roast chicken. “Flambé the dessert.” It’s Balthazar and it’s Odeon. We’re talking counterfeited French decadence, sometimes a bit Italian, but always in big, loose American strokes.
Bringing that vision of Big Apple brasserie dining to London is One Club Row, the recently opened collaboration between chef Patrick Powell, Camberwell Arms co-owner James Dye and NoMad NYC alumni Benjy Leibowitz, which sits above their Shoreditch pub, The Knave of Clubs at the flash end of Bethnal Green Road. Why, one might ask, would you bother to open a New York-style brasserie over a Parisian one? Because it is 2025, and to add one more name to the teetering pile of Camille, Constance, Francois, Henri, Josephine and Josette would be tempting fate on a bust. So instead, the savvily business-minded are adapting and iterating on the Francophile moment. That’s why Dove, Jackson Boxer’s reimagining of the site of his daintier seafood restaurant Orasay, isn’t a little sibling to Henri (the Parisian bistro he opened at Experimental Group’s Henrietta Hotel in Covent Garden last year) and why its signal dish is based on a burger he ate on a trip to Manhattan 20 years ago.