Nuala, Old Street

It's a sign of just how old I and my peer group in London are getting that meals in fancy new restaurants often begin with a period of reminiscing about the previous use - or uses - of the building we happen to find ourselves in. I remember this particular spot on City Road, when I worked in the area in around 2008, being home to an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet, but my dining companion last night's knowledge of the area stretches back even further, to when it was apparently a grim, bare-bones nightclub with blacked-out windows and murky reputation. That was when you'd occasionally catch Noel Fielding in the Dragon Bar just over the road, and a pint cost £4. Yes, that far back.

Anyway, in the now-almost-unrecognisable Silicon Roundabout, up pops Nuala, as flashy and "designed" as befits the area but with a welcome as warm and kind as an Irish mammy. Yes, Nuala takes a certain inspiration from the Emerald Isle as head chef Niall Davidson (formerly of, well, lots of places but most recently Chiltern Firehouse) hails from there, but the menu is far from traditional and has rather more Dalston than Dalkey about it. The friendliness and charm of the front of house, though, seems very Irish.

From "Snacks" (you'll know how the menu is organised if you've eaten at another cutting-edge British-Irish restaurant, the Dairy, in the last few years) we tried cod's roe crackers, superb smooth, salty tarama on top of delicate corn crisps, and neat discs of home made soda bread, sweet and soft, topped with shavings of foie gras and enchanting ribbons of preserved clementine.

"Crab salad in chilled cucumber broth" performed the intricate task of balancing white and brown crab meat utterly perfectly - just enough brown to have that earthy umami kick, sweetened with just the right amount of white - and the "broth" - in fact more like a gel - had a clean, defined cucumber taste. It was the kind of crab dish you always hope to find on a menu like this, but it's by no means a given that every kitchen can pull it off. Nuala managed it though.

Then the best sweetbreads I can remember eating in a long time. Huge, beautiful things, glazed with a superb meaty jus and without a hint of the mealiness that can affect lesser examples, they would have been astonishingly successful even without the "cauliflower rarebit", rich and smokey from the open grill, which accompanied them. Much like the crab dish, you hope when you see something like this on a menu it will live up to the promise, but only very rarely is it realised quite so brilliantly.

Rabbit is another tricky meat to get right - cooked well, it can be lean and gamey without being dry, but I've lost count of the number of times I've been presented with vaguely rabbity lumps of cotton wool, in otherwise even quite accomplished restaurants. Needless to say, at Nuala they know what they're doing with a bit of bunny, and a lovely grilled leg was presented alongside a couple of medallions of stuffed loin, all of it beautifully moist. Chunks of salt-baked celeriac sat in a subtle cream sauce studded with samphire, and added up to a very rewarding plate of food indeed.

Even superficially more straightforward dishes had plenty to recommend them. True, rump is often a chewier cut of cow, ordered often with the tacit understanding that whatever you lose in texture you'll gain in taste. And yes, although it took a bit of chewing, the taste from this beautiful bit of steak, Torloisk Highland cattle cooked to medium-rare over the coals and funky with a good deal of dry-aging, was well worth the effort and then some. This producer is a new one to me, but I will certainly be looking out for it on menus in the future.

It's at this point in lesser restaurants, whether the savoury courses had been mediocre or even quite good, that, sated and slowing, we'd pay up and leave. However we were having such a blast at Nuala that not only did we not dash home after mains but, having come to the conclusion that this kitchen could basically do no wrong, we decided to order all the desserts. So, a char-grilled pineapple, delicately filleted and arranged into a pretty yellow rose was joined by a quenelle of buttermilk/lime sorbet...

...pumpkin ice cream boasted a fantastic sliky-smooth texture that only the very best home made ice cream has, and a chocolate and coffee affair had a nice big caffeine kick paired with cool, light dairy. All of it was polished off so thoroughly they could have re-used the artful stoneware without use of a pot-washer.

There's a lot of pessmism blowing aroud the London restaurant scene lately. Some of it, no doubt, is well-founded; the effect Brexit will have on our ability to attract quality talent from Europe and the world is yet to be quantified, and ingredient inflation is already making things very difficult for Spanish and Italian restaurants (and many others) who import much of their menus. But however easy it is to succumb to fear and despair, and however much the following months and years may give us reason to do so, it seems London's restaurants, for now, have decided to just sod it all and carry on being brilliant anyway. So, the best advice I can give is to make a booking at Nuala immediately and make the bloody most of it.

9/10