Roshan's Kitchen at The Railway Tavern, N8
Your friendly neighbourhood Caribbean-Sri Lankan
It was the dense, gelatinous slabs of jerk pork belly, smeared thick with treacly, spiced sauce, that stopped me in my tracks at Roshan’s Kitchen.
Good jerk should hardly have come as a surprise though. When Crouch End mainstay Banner’s closed last September, it earned eulogies in the London and national press that far outstripped its position as a neighbourhood mostly-Caribbean spot, especially amidst a tumult of restaurant closures over the past twelve months.
Some of that media acclaim no doubt comes from the specific neighbourhood it happens to be a spot in — Crouch End has rarely been short of journalists at the best of times — and a little more is down to the fact that Bob Dylan ate there once. But it also speaks to the restaurant’s enduring appeal across three decades, brought to a close only by owner Juliette Banner’s desire to see the place end on her own terms.
It’s reassuring, then, that she was quick to publicly give her blessing to Roshan’s Kitchen, a new residency at the nearby Railway Tavern from a team of former Banner’s kitchen staff, led by the eponymous Roshan, carrying on some of the recipes they’ve spent their careers cooking.
Much of the menu has been lifted fairly directly from Banner’s itself, not least its anarchic energy. There are Caribbean mainstays, including jerk three ways — chicken, that pork, or salmon — and a goat curry roti. But then the two salads are Greek-inspired; because this a pub they do an obligatory beef burger; and the weekend brunch menu veers threateningly from an English fry-up to a chorizo quesadilla, with a jerk baguette thrown in to remind you that this is nominally a Caribbean joint. For some reason you can get padron peppers as a starter.
Perhaps the halloumi salad is a banger; I confess I don’t know and likely never will, because you’d struggle to tear me away from the pork belly whenever I go back. We ordered some as a starter (a tactical move to save crushing decision paralysis when it got to the mains — this isn’t my first rodeo) and were served a pile of pork that would put some places’ second courses to shame. Thick, sticky, wobbly in all the right places, this is pork belly as it’s meant to be eaten, the type where you’re never really sure which bits are fat and which meat, and are long past caring anyway. I’m not sure there’s anything in the world I want to eat alongside a pint more than this.
The seafood we try impresses a little less. Salt and rose pepper calamari comes out a little limp, neither crispy nor spiced enough to stand out. Meanwhile the jerk marinade loses its lustre on a salmon steak, the saccharine spice simply cloying without pork fat to cut it.
Roshan’s chief creative contribution is a small spread of Sri Lankan dishes, which dovetail beautifully with the Caribbean fare. There can’t be many other menus that offer you two types of goat curry and some mutton for good measure; naturally we ordered all three.
The mutton comes as another starter, small deep-fried dumplings stuffed with morsels of meat and a thick, heavily spiced Sri Lankan curry. I know of no higher compliment to give than that these gave the pork a run for its money.
The Sri Lankan goat curry, flanked by a poppadom and a nest of hoppers, felt warm, enriching, nourishing. The Caribbean version, nestled inside a roti larger than my head, is a slightly sanitised boneless take that intersperses tender goat with starchy cubes of cassava. It’s punchy, rich, and a comically generous portion, but nevertheless leaves me slightly lamenting the lack of any knobbly bits to gnaw on.
Roshan’s Kitchen only opened this month, and there are, bless it, clear signs that this is a work-in-progress. For reasons I can’t quite figure out the menu can’t decide if the place is actually called ‘Amitshan’s Kitchen’ instead, while a printed instruction to order at the bar has already been half blocked out by a sticker telling you to wait for table service (the latter seems to be the rule for food, but not drinks, an only slightly graceless compromise).
Perhaps most charmingly, the “garlic-rubbed sourdough” along with our jerk pork belly is quite clearly a toasted supermarket garlic baguette, but naturally no less delicious for it.
I only ate at Banner’s once, and the appeal was easy to see. I always suspected that if I lived nearby I’d eat there often; I didn’t, so I didn’t. I don’t live any closer to The Railway Tavern, where Roshan’s makes its home, and in all honesty I don’t know when I’ll be back — but that’s okay. It’s still at its heart a neighbourhood spot, and this just ain’t my neighbourhood.
But if I’m ever in Crouch End and a pint comes calling, you could bet the house there’ll be jerk pork belly alongside it.