The Brave, N1
A great pub trying to be an average restaurant
When I raved about The Tamil Crown a few weeks ago, I pretty much had just one complaint: it’s not really a pub, despite its protestations.
I had the same fears about The Brave, a new Islington opening from chef James Cochran, when I first visited it for dinner last week. It looks like a pub, it sits in a spot that’s been a pub for as long as I’ve lived nearby, it calls itself a pub. But it feels an awful lot like a restaurant. All, that is, except for one compact corner, which turns out to be the best bit of the whole place.
The fact that Cochran’s take on a bistro-pub (Is that different to a gastro-pub? Who even knows any more) should lean more on the former than the latter shouldn’t come as a great surprise when you look at his career: he’s worked at fine dining favourites The Ledbury and The Harwood Arms, before making his name (almost literally) at James Cochran EC3. Legal disputes made that success short lived, but a win on Great British Menu and the opening of 12:51 set him back on the right path. What unifies his professional cooking — apart from a brief lockdown stint slinging delivery fried chicken burgers — is that it’s been with fussy, fancy food, the type that comes on small plates with high price tags.
The same is true of the main dining room at The Brave, which dominates almost the entirety of the site. They’re small plates, for sharing, we were told as we perused the menu, and they weren’t kidding: £13 of braised beef shin and potato dumplings nets you three bite-sized dumplings and just enough beef to hide beneath them. £8 could get you a single piece of prawn toast, or two teaspoons worth of beef tartare on top of a couple bricks of tattie and neep hash browns.
I don’t like to complain about portion sizes and prices, it feels churlish at best. But at times it feels egregious, and The Brave’s pub setting amplifies the effect. Whatever a pub is, it should never be stingy — and if I spend £45 per head without a drop of alcohol, I probably shouldn’t leave hungry. My mood isn’t improved by the fact that the dining room reeks of a black truffle upsell, a sure sign of a menu built to meet a price point.
Perhaps I’d be more forgiving if the actual food had blown me away. It’s good, to be sure, but it’s not quite charming enough to let you forget how little there is of it. That prawn toast, small as it may have been, hides exceptionally juicy meat beneath a crisp, sesame-crusted exterior and a tangle of green spring onion, and is perhaps the best savoury bite we eat. A single large scallop arrives in a pool of coconutty tikka masala sauce that I slurp up happily, but what sounds like the star dish — crisp mutton neck with pickled mussels and butternut squash — drowns its ingredients within a homogenising sauce. Why bother pickling a mussel if you’re not going to let me taste it?
We nearly skipped dessert, but took a punt on a slice of chocolate tart, which fortunately has a soothing effect: the chocolate custard has a slight grain to it, but is intensely chocolatey enough that such quibbles mostly fall away.
It’s also, perhaps tellingly, the simplest plate we’re served all night: just a slice of tart and a scoop of ice cream. No fuss, no muss. Everything else is served with flourishes, in layers and drizzles. Tweezers were almost certainly involved. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but it bristles a little when you start to wonder if they could have found the time to fit just one or two more dumplings on the plate if they weren’t so busy dolloping the sauce just so.
What a relief, then, when I returned a few days later for lunch with The Brave’s bar snacks menu in mind. At lunch the snacks are all there is; at dinner, you’ll find them relegated to the one corner of the pub that’s still, well, a pub. There are small tables, stools, and a bar you can actually walk up to and order a drink from — a whole metre’s worth, with the rest of the expansive wooden bar top sadly stuck in a dining room where no-one can get near it. There’s a decent, albeit safe, set of beers on tap too.
If the vibes are better in the bar, so is the food. The best part of the main menu — that prawn toast — returns here, and is summarily outshined by almost everything else on offer. The hash browns reappear, but there are more of them and twice the size, the tartare subbed for an impeccable chip shop curry sauce and scraps to help soak it up. A boulder of a scotch egg arrives not long after, yolk still oozing inside. It’s made with jerk chicken apparently, which gets a little lost, but the homemade scotch bonnet jam on the side is a spicy-sweet wonder.
That balance of sweet and heat returns in a bowl of fried chicken in a hot honey glaze. I am tired of hot honey already, but this might be the best take on it I’ve tried: intense sweetness that gives way to warmth and a vinegar bite. The chicken is perfectly fried, with a deep, crunchy breading, and a tenner nets you about as much food as £40 would from the main menu. Spend 50 pence more and you could get a rack of crisp, sticky pork ribs instead, the syrupy glaze matched well by a heap of pink pickled onions.
Cochran has a choice to make. Right now he’s running what could be an excellent pub, but it’s trapped on the fringes of quite an average restaurant. Is this to be up-market haute cuisine at fine dining prices with truffle on tap? Or is it smart pub grub with a few bougie twists and clever nods to Cochran’s Scottish-Caribbean heritage? I left the bar having spent half as much, feeling twice as full, and knowing I’ll be back for more — there’s a smoked eel toastie that’s erratically available, but will be mine. On the other hand, I don’t think the main menu will tempt me back any time soon.
Normally I wish that gastro-pubs would give up the pretence and just call themselves restaurants. I hope The Brave does the opposite: ditch the gastro, embrace the pub, and I’ll be back on the regular for pork ribs and a pint.