Auguste, E8

Clowning around

I think I know how to have a great night at Auguste. Turn up early, if you can. Order a £5 camparino — a gussied up campari and soda, if we’re being honest, but no worse for it — a plate of coppa, and some fat gordal olives. Then fit in a round or two of grilled skewers and bagna cauda, before you quit while you’re ahead and go somewhere else for dinner.

Auguste is a new opening that’s taken over Papi’s old spot in London Fields. On the surface, it’s something all too familiar in the city — a small plates Italian joint where everything’s designed to share. The slight twist is the regional focus: Abruzzo, a central Italian region that gets pretty short shrift when it comes to international acclaim, where chef Mike Bagnall once lived. It’s mountain country, and so lamb features heavily, though the fisherman’s stew brodetto alla vastese represents Abruzzo’s eastern coast. Still, the Abruzzo inspiration is loose at best, so don’t come here expecting slavish adherence to tradition.

There are signs that something is off from the start, when four slices of dense, gummy wholewheat ciabatta arrive with olive oil and balsamic. Ciabatta is not a storied Italian bread — it’s barely older than I am — and so I don’t see much need to be precious about it. Still, a crisp crust and an airy crumb feel like minimum requirements for the category, and this has neither. Gentle folds of coppa prove much better accompaniment for an aperitivo, as do thick slices of pecorino and those aforementioned olives.

Auguste’s most interesting output, and perhaps its best, are the arrosticini. Slender skewers of lamb, British wagyu, and veal liver are served thick and fast, enough to leave the air thick with the smell of lamb fat. A hair over-salted (that’s going to become a theme), these are otherwise excellent, just as good by themselves as they are smeared with anchovy-laced bagna cauda. Even the liver is carefully managed, spiked with chunks of onion to balance out the funkier flavours.

If this was where Auguste’s menu ended, it would be a happy place indeed. Cheese and charcuterie, spritzes and skewers, and then on elsewhere for more. Perhaps such a short menu would seem unambitious; but then that ambition is what lets Auguste down, its larger menu not good, not bad, but maddeningly inconsistent.

The rest ranges from excellent to catastrophic, which is an uncomfortable betting spread when you’re spending up to £18 per small plate. A puddle of stracciatella is dotted with bright, blackened datterini tomatoes, wonderfully contrasted with a fermented peperonata and a pool of peppery olive oil. But the same kitchen serves us a piece of Shetland cod so salty it makes me wince, bobbing in a bright orange mussel stew that I presume was meant to taste of something other than Maldon, but I couldn’t tell you what.

Chicken saltimbocca is cleverly constructed, the savouriness of its prosciutto wrapping contrasted with an almost sugary soffritto. But the same trick fails in the sole pasta dish, caramelised onion and cheese cappelletti simply overpowered by a saline lamb broth. Inch-thick spears of asparagus are cooked to the perfect crisp, lifted further by a wild garlic sauce and achingly fresh peas. But just before they arrive comes a quartet of potato rosti that are somehow both cold and overcooked; I find mine can’t be cut so much as shattered. Each rosti, smothered in too much blue cheese cream, costs £6. Restaurant pricing is complex, and times are hard, but if you’re going to charge more than a fiver for a single square-inch of potato then you must at least make sure you cook it right.

Dessert comes out better: a chocolate-dusted mascarpone tart in a crisp, buttery pastry shell. I quibble with the menu’s claim that it includes spiced rum and coffee — none of us could taste either — but it works, so who cares?

Auguste has only been open a few short weeks, and teething pains are inevitable. It’s there in the service as much as anything else, which proved slow and a little flaky. We were brought the wrong number of skewers, which still made it onto the bill after we’d been told they wouldn’t; while the morels and boar we ordered never arrived, having apparently sold out, not that anyone told us until we asked about it. They clearly need to figure out their ordering advice too: as a table of four we were told to order the whole menu, which combined with wine ran to £300 in total, for £75 a head. David Ellis at The Standard was advised to do the exact same thing for two, racking up a similar bill for half as many people. We left slightly peckish, I imagine he departed stuffed and feeling slightly poor.

I don’t want to knock Auguste too cruelly, because it has the bones of an excellent restaurant. The menu is considered, the space is simple but appealing, the vibe is London Fields all over. But at these prices the cooking simply cannot be this inconsistent. The highs are high, but the lows are cavernous, and Bagnall and his team have a lot to work on if Auguste is going to last beyond its buzzy opening weeks. I would love to spend next summer lounging in Hackney with a spritz in one hand and a skewer in the other; I hope for Auguste’s sake that I get my chance.