If you’re going to name your restaurant after a single ingredient, you better bloody know how to use it. That doesn’t seem to be a problem for Morchella, which puts the titular morel mushroom to exceptional use in a smoked morchella rigatoni.
The presentation at the table in a piping hot clay pot smacks a little of a flashy centrepiece, but the cooking itself is anything but: meaty smoked mushrooms, a soupy sauce, and a generous dusting of parmesan. It’s simple, but certainly not subtle — a bit of a theme — and I only wish I hadn’t had to share our portion between four, all eagerly eyeing every muscular hunk of mushroom.
Morchella is, after all, a modern European small plates joint where the dishes are intended to be shared — please try not to look so surprised. From the team behind Newington Green stalwart Perilla, this new opening takes a former bank for its airy, high-ceilinged home in Clerkenwell, and the space is undeniably beautiful, with a small bar tucked to one side ready to host early arrivals.
Those drinks don’t come cheap though, nor does much else on the menu. Cocktails and aperitifs don’t sting too much — £13 for a negroni with a dash of Cynar feels par for the course, while a spritz of the same even dropped below a tenner — but the wine list spans 15 pages and only features a handful of bottles for less than £50. Sharing the cheapest bottle between four, plus an aperitif each, dinner ran close to £90 a head, so be prepared for a bit of a splurge.
Some dishes fare worse for it than others. A single scallop, bedecked with butter and springy ruffles of cauliflower mushroom in its own shell, runs to £18. Scallops are rarely the budget option, and restaurant economies are more difficult than ever, but it’s still hard to entirely justify spending £9 per bite, especially when a pool of butter overwhelms those expensive ingredients anyway. It’s delicious — butter usually is — but still a little hard to stomach.
The good news is that things get better. For one, I’ve been a touch unfair: I didn’t explain that all those prices include service, so you do at least pay exactly what you see, rather than having 12.5% thrown on at the end. That’s a welcome move that’s clear for customers and (hopefully) fair to staff, so I don’t want to rag on the prices too much.
Just as importantly, there’s value here if you know where to look. Spanakopita is reinvented as a spring roll-esque tube of spinach-stuffed filo. At £3.50 a piece this is almost a steal, a silky green paste spilling out of a pastry shell that couldn’t hope to control it all. The morchella may earn the restaurant its name, but it’s this that I’d rush to come back for.
A shareable slab of pork jowl isn’t bad at £16 either, crisped cheek fat and flesh served with a sweeter side to offset the salt. Elsewhere, generous chunks of monkfish top a bed of cuttlefish, fennel seed, and inky grains, deeply savoury in every direction at once, and all too easy to devour.
‘Salt cod churros’ is a deeply silly name for fried spears of salt cod which never quite offer anything beyond the ‘salt’ half of the equation. This is the only real dud from our savoury selection, though the piquant, tomatoey paste beneath is undeniably compelling.
Main courses are sometimes a little drab in small plates restaurants: hunks of protein, plainly presented, deprived of the invention that runs through the dinkier offerings. If anything, the opposite might be true here.
The morchella rigatoni is undeniably the star, but it comes with backup. A whole sea bream coated in a pungent sauce vierge and studded with olives proved a punchy alternative to London’s legion plates of grilled bream in butter, while a salt-baked poussin is accompanied by pickled chillies and cornichons alongside its sticky sauce. These are both intense, flavour-forward dishes, no holds barred cooking that demonstrates the breadth of Morchella’s varied Mediterranean influences and a culinary philosophy of maximalism over restraint. The kitchen here doesn’t pull many punches, and I’ll admit that I’m all the more fond of them for it.
Desserts prove more hit and miss. A light panna cotta of rhubarb and almond was deliciously delicate, ethereal slivers of fruit floating on a custard so thin you could drink it through a straw; a grapefruit and olive cake tasted entirely of the former and not at all of the latter, a sharp, bitter failure only partially redeemed by the dense crumb.
I’m not sure Morchella quite rises above being just another modern European restaurant in a city overflowing with them, but it is one of the better ones if you can afford to foot the bill. The broad Mediterranean focus pays dividends, creating the excuse to pack the small plates with big flavours and take a brute force approach to standing out from the pack.