It’s not hard to get lost in fantasy sitting inside Bar Valette, the new Shoreditch restaurant from The Clove Club’s Isaac McHale. Staring out at graffitied buildings, doubledecker buses, and overground railway lines, pretending you’re on holiday. It may be chucking it down outside, but inside Bar Valette, there are swiss chard fritters from the French Riviera, snails à la madrileña and bottles of Rioja to take you away from it all.
Bar Valette occupies the Kingsland Road site that was previously Two Lights (McHale’s modern American restaurant that fell victim to the pandemic). McHale’s reimagined the space, drawing on memories of restaurants dear to him, such as La Merenda in Nice and Ganbara in San Sebastian. The result is a cosy, arty sort of bistro, with an attractive open kitchen, cheerful prints on the walls, bottles of wine on the shelves, specials on the chalkboard, and paper tablecloths on the tables.
McHale has assembled a crack team for the opening in Erin Jackson-Yates, former head chef at Josh Niland’s restaurant Saint Peter in Sydney, and restaurant manager and sommelier Wilem Powell, ex Quay, Sydney. Both previously worked with McHale at The Clove Club.
The menu is a freewheeling collection of recipes from McHale’s work and travels. Some haven’t come far. The nuggets of buttermilk fried chicken in pine on the snacks menu have travelled barely 200 metres from The Clove Club round the corner, for example, and the cecina-style White Park beef ham with Spanish bread sticks was cured in the aging room there. Besides McHale’s own creations, most of the other dishes come from or are clearly influenced by southern France or northern Spain. From the former: barbajuan (the above-mentioned swiss chard and ricotta fritters) and red mullet with green olive emulsion; from the latter: jarred white asparagus with mayonnaise; pied de mouton in egg yolk sauce and truffle; gâteau basque (here with a layer of Christmassy mincemeat and PX); and hearty fabada asturiana with sausage, pork belly, and black pudding. Some of the cooking is quite retro: you can see it in the presentation (all doilies and lemon wedges) and the preparation. Rabbit leg comes boned out and stuffed; duck fat-sautéed potatoes are sliced into thick ‘scallops’; and servings of vegetables come in old-fashioned oval china dishes. You can just imagine the type of long-standing, family-run country restaurants McHale had on his moodboard.
Powell has put together a wine list to suit, including sherry poured en magnum (a rare sight, indeed), French and Spanish wines from classic and unsung regions (including the Balearics, Catalonia and the Pyrenees), and large format bottles of British Isles cider.
It would be remiss not to mention the prices at Bar Valette: they look punchy on paper. Granted, the produce and skills on display don’t come cheap; but the budget-conscious diner would be well advised to read the menu in advance and draw on all their willpower at the table, lest they be swayed by one more £9 lamb chop (exceptional quality from Lake District Farmers), one more dinky £6 crab tart, or one too many of the middle courses (£16 to £26). Larger main courses start at £41 for the rabbit leg, £42 for smoked sea trout, and rise to £96 for the rib-eye but what’s not obvious from the menu is they are designed to be shared. Bar Valette is certainly a more affordable option than The Clove Club (currently £225 for the tasting menu) but, for many, it’s still in the special occasion price bracket. These are tough times in London. When even in swanky West London, customers are feeling the pinch (Jackson Boxer has recently transformed Orasay into the more affordable Dove), it will be interesting to see how Bar Valette lands.
WHEN 25th January 2025
WHERE 28-30 Kingsland Road, London, E2 8AA
FOLLOW @barvalette
BOOK barvalette.com
The Good Food Guide allows three to six months before anonymously inspecting a new restaurant. Look out for a full review coming soon.
