Cornelius, N8
My big fat Romanian wedding venue
An empty wedding venue is a surreal place to eat your supper. A lonely balloon arch in one corner, a laptop pumping out playlists in another, at least three too many mirrors reflecting back the empty dance floor. Put like that, it sounds pretty awful. And yet Cornelius, a north London venue that moonlights as a Romanian restaurant, is an oddly charming spot.
Occupying a standalone brick building that used to be a pump house, just outside Hornsey station, Cornelius is deceptively large. While from the road it appears to be a small, squat structure, in fact it’s set at the bottom of a slope, and sprawls widely across two floors and a long terrace. It even has its own car park, a rare luxury in Zone 3.
When I visited for a friend’s birthday, I suspected that our booking of 22 would dominate the dining room. Little did I know how right I was: we were the only customers on the ground floor, despite it being a Friday night. Presumably the rest of the locals didn’t come because they’d assumed there’d be a wedding on. I say we were the only guests on the ground floor, because we certainly weren’t the only people in the venue. Our evening was accompanied by the steady, bassy boom of pop music from an upstairs Bar Mitzvah, deafening every time you exited into the main hallway. Congratulations to the young man; what a place to come of age.
The first sign of promise from Cornelius is its website: a gloriously dated, over-animated mess that defaults to Romanian. Nothing could have given me more hope for what was to come.
The menu itself is sprawling, the sort of multi-page monstrosity you might expect from a city centre tourist trap. Here, though, it seems more to represent an earnest effort to represent as much of Romanian cuisine as possible in one place. I hope I’m not doing any Romanians a disservice when I gently note that “as much of Romanian cuisine as possible” still mostly means meat: grilled, roasted, or stewed, but always meat. There is a single vegetarian main on offer — a cauliflower steak — along with a few starters and dips that sound like they should be vegetarian, but are by no means guaranteed to be. Cornelius is strictly for the carnivores.
Homemade mititei seem to be the pick of the grill: skinless sausages that deserve a place in Max Halley’s orbit, juicy, meaty, and impressively rich. Lamb pastramă is just as intensely flavoured, though a little tougher from its time on the grill. It might be worth ordering just for the sinus-clearing mujdei sauce, a white paste made almost entirely from raw garlic. If you want more of a spread, there are a few sharing platters for the grilled options, though the menu is charmingly coy about what’s included in the “outlaw-style hearty board,” and what more you get by splashing out for “Boyar’s premium assortment.” We did ask what each included, but the answer was rather nondescript: “grilled meat.”
Not everything comes off the grill of course. There are cabbage rolls, the old continental stalwart, stuffed with a tumble of mincemeat and accompanied by a mound of polenta the colour of the Sun. Pork knuckle arrives in thick, pinkish slabs, skin criss-cross marked by the fire, slowly collapsing into stewed beans. An enticing sheep stew “in homemade bread” gives big bread bowl energy, but turns out to simply mean a pastry lid. This writer has never been one to bemoan the surprise appearance of a pie though, and this did nothing to change that fact.
In case you can’t tell already, our end of the table may have slightly over-ordered. That left us with a little less capacity than I might have liked for dessert. There are a few on the menu, but I’m reliably assured that the only move is the papanași: a colossal doughnut made from a cheese-based dough, topped with sour cream and a loose jam. Unless you’ve shown remarkable restraint so far in the meal, consider this strictly for sharing, but it is worth making an attempt at: it’s dense, doughy, and surprisingly tangy, just enough to offset all the fat, sugar, and looming indigestion.
My fiancée and I have a running joke as we slowly build towards meaningful wedding planning: everywhere we go that turns out to be good, she turns to me excitedly and grins: “We could get married here!” At Cornelius, unusually, that’s true. And while I’m not convinced that next year’s ceremony will be Romanian in theme, I could think of worse ways to mark the moment than mititei sausages and a cabbage roll or two.