Had you asked me what Shoreditch was missing, I probably wouldn’t have said ‘another oyster restaurant’ – but sometimes you don’t know what you want until you’re sitting in it necking salt-water bivalve molluscs and drinking champagne. Allow me to introduce Pearly Queen.
What and where is Pearly Queen?
It’s a seafood restaurant in that quiet bit of Shoreditch between Aldgate and Spitalfields, just down the road from the excellent Culpeper pub. It’s a nice bit of town, far enough away from Shoreditch High Street that you don’t notice all the bridge and tunnel types flocking in from Essex for a night on the lash.
Who’s responsible?
It’s the second outpost from Michelin starred chef Tom Brown. He’s best known for his Hackney Wick restaurant Cornerstone, a seafood-focused little palace to gastronomy close to Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
Brown looks exactly what your Halloween costume would look like if you were going as “a chef”, right down to the “love & war” tattoos on his knuckles. There’s no denying his pedigree in the kitchen, though, with Cornerstone winning the praise of critics and the Michelin guide alike, and Pearly Queen carrying that momentum into a new venue.
The counter at Shoreditch restaurant Pearly Queen is where it’s at
What’s the vibe at Pearly Queen?
It’s super laid back but don’t let that fool you – the cooking here is thoroughly excellent. The dining room is a soft, grey box dominated by a wet bar where (more) tattooed chefs shuck oysters as you watch. There’s a neon sign on the wall reading “The World is Yours” that I presume is by Tracey Emin and a portrait of every chef’s favourite chef Anthony Bourdain. It’s a nice place to spend an evening, basically, low-key swanky but without any air of pretension.
And the food?
I started, as you must, with a dozen oysters, brought in from the boat that day and tasting as fresh and salty as the sea itself. Slathered with a not-insignificant amount of bright orange scotch bonnet hot sauce, they also have a fiery heat to them. Lovely.
The menu is, of course, split into “small” and “large” plates, of which you order and essentially arbitrary number and hope you get it right. I had a delectable crab arancini the size of a fist, served in a porcelain crab shell filled with a vivid green wild garlic sauce. Truffle is also involved and the gestalt is divine.
Pearly Queen’s cuttlefish thousand layer lasagne that caught the eye of critics when the restaurant opened last year is no longer on the menu but I had a nice dish of cuttlefish ‘bourguignon’ with seaweed gremolata, which was probably a little too flavoursome for the fish but which I nonetheless scraped from the bottom of the pot with no complaints.
Monkfish served on the bone with a cracking black peppercorn sauce was a highlight, in the way well-cooked monkfish will always be a highlight, although it was given a run for its money by the humble side of mashed potato in an impossibly rich Guinness and oyster gravy. Finally there was ginger cake served with blue cheese – blue cheese! – which is how I will now serve ginger cake until the day I die.
• To book a table at Pearly Queen go to the website here