Vesper, EC1
A strong start
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Here’s a charming thing you should know about Vesper, the new opening from restaurateur Jackson Boxer: its wine list starts at £33 for a bottle. And it climbs slowly: there are nine bottles on the current menu below £40, plus carafes and half-bottles for those who prefer to order less. The titular martini is a good size for only a tenner, while the wonderfully tart gooseberry margarita, the restaurant’s most expensive cocktail, is a wallet-busting… £12.
There’s a lot else to enjoy about Vesper, all of which I’ll get to shortly, but for a restaurant in the heart of Clerkenwell, one which apparently also expects to shift £250 bottles of Pol Roger and £39 veal chops, the drinks menu offers a remarkably generous point of entry. Coming off the back of recent visits to Bar Etna and Tiella, two restaurants I enjoyed a great deal but whose wine lists kick in around £45 and veer sharply upwards from there, it’s a refreshing reminder that good food doesn’t have to price people out of good wine too. And it is good: we flitted around the cheaper glasses, including a fine riesling and a wonderful pair of kegged wines from Portugal, and had a very pleasant time of it indeed.
I shouldn’t be surprised that Boxer, of all people, knows how to make a restaurant approachable. After all, he’s the man behind Dove, which turned steak offcuts into a viral burger capable of filling the dining room by half past 5, then emptying it again in time for the regular dinner service. And that burger is back at Vesper too, though strictly off-menu for now, and expected to be as limited in quantity as it is as Dove, where there are just 10 per service.
Vesper isn’t otherwise an especially cheap restaurant — we spent just over £100 per head, admittedly with three or four of these enticingly affordable drinks each — but the food still feels like good value. It’s served with generosity, everything except the antipasti arriving in heaps and mounds, rather than carefully plated morsels (though while we’re talking morsels, the adobo-encrusted pickled carrots topped with whipped soy prove an excellent opening nibble).
The fried potato pizzetta is the obvious example. A great discus of dough, it’s smeared with stracciatella and topped by folds of a meaty mortadella, though the touch of mostarda adds just a little too much sweetness, leaving this teetering dangerously on the edge of fairground doughnut territory. It’s almost overwhelmingly proportioned given its part in a larger meal, though best eaten quickly — as with all fried things, its charm begins to fade as it cools.
I unwittingly visited Vesper on opening night, which meant the common theme running through the dishes was the sense that they were about 90% there. Parcels of chicken liver agnolotti, rich filling enlivened by a savoury-sweet madeira jus, could have been extraordinary if they hadn’t been just a hair under-cooked. Squid was beautifully presented, stuffed with a shrimp and middlewhite boudin sausage, the prawn-and-pork filling reminiscent of siu mai — but the salted egg yolk at its side was oddly under-powered, adding little to the plate. Even the towering side salad, green leaves dusted with spenwood cheese, needed just a little more sharpness to truly sing.
Only one dish really felt flawed in concept, rather than execution: a spring onion pancake topped with raw tuna, anchovy, and olive. The pancake was thick-layered and stodgy, crisp on the outside but oddly chewy further in, and the gilda-influenced elements utterly overwhelmed the delicate raw fish. Most dishes felt a few evenings of fine-tuning away from true excellence; this might need a more fundamental reinvention.
Then there’s dessert. The table next to us ordered what looked to be a very fine slab of Guinness-infused black velvet cake, while we had a great time with a dome of lemon meringue hiding a pool of rice pudding at its base. I would have upped the rice pudding ratio, but then I’m a self-affirmed sicko for the stuff.
But when it comes to the canelé with rum sauce and goat’s milk ice cream, no fine-tuning is required, and I certainly don’t want to hear a word about reinvention. Frankly, this warrants listed status, a piece of pudding perfection that must be kept safe from undue tampering. A sticky toffee pudding that’s gone on holiday to the south of France and come back with pretensions (STP Guy, look away now), it pulls its ostentations off so well you can hardly begrudge them: the chewy crust of the canelé’s edge, the sharp tang of the goat’s cream, the subtle hint of rum lurking in the sticky, sweet sauce. I don’t know how to spell the half-gasped sound of admiration I made after my first bite; I can only tell you that it became increasingly guttural as I went on.
That canelé is all the proof I need that Vesper has got the goods. Slightly slow service and a little extra bite to the pasta are expected on a restaurant’s first night open; serving the best dessert I’ve eaten all year is not. If the rest clicks into place, Vesper could be one of the better restaurants in an area already heaving with them — and no, that isn’t just the cheap wine talking, though it certainly doesn’t hurt.