Summers, Kilburn

Pop quiz! What do the following restaurants have in common:

Lyle's
Hereford Road
Anchor and Hope
32 Great Queen Street
The Canton Arms
The Camberwell Arms
The Marksman
Sparrow
...and possibly a great many more that I can't quite bring to mind at the moment?

The answer is, as well as being fine ways to while away a lunchtime, they all have direct links to St. John, surely one of the most important and influential restaurants to have ever existed in the capital. Alumni of this hallowed, whitewashed spot in Farringdon have spread far and wide through London and beyond, taking with them a passion for seasonal British produce, the desire to fill their menus with unusual cuts of offal and game (the "nose-to-tail" philosophy), and - perhaps more importantly than anything else - a cool confidence in stripped-back, no-nonsense presentation which informs just as much the attitude of the front of house as anything on the plate.

It seems extraordinary not only that one restaurant has so many direct descendants but that so many of them - in fact pretty much all you'd care to mention - are so incredibly good. Look back on the blog for reviews of any in that list above and you'll find places of class and charm, serving seasonal modern British food that has come to define what it means to eat out in London in these past 10-15 or so bewildering, game-changing years.

Perhaps, then, knowing that head chef Ruairidh (pronounced "Rory") Summers, who has leant his surname to this charmingly bare-bones operation above an Irish pub on Kilburn High St, was previously sous at St John Bread and Wine in Spitalfields is enough of a qualification in of itself. He's ex- St. John, so of course it's going to be good. What else do you need to know? Just get yourself a booking, hop on the Jubilee line and enjoy an evening of bright, seasonal modern British food. It's that simple.

Well, OK, if you insist, some highlights. We ate the entire menu so maybe I won't go into exhaustive detail on every dish, but I'll point out some of the must-order items, beginning with the house pickles, colourful and crisp with a perfect sweet-sour balance.

Cod's roe and radishes on toast, smooth as silk with bags of salty seafood flavour.

If I was to make one criticism of these asparagus it would be that the Ogleshield cheese hadn't quite been given enough heat on top; it would have been nice to have them draped in gooey melted cheese. However the spears themselves were wonderfully cooked - ever-so-slightly charred and with a good bite - and the layer of toasted pine nuts added a lovely malty note.

Ox heart, perfectly seasoned and tender, draped over a few pieces of artichoke hearts and dressed with green herbs, is the kind of dish that would make Fergus Henderson himself proud. These announced their arrival on the table with a heady aroma of grilled cow, the kind of thing you'd only normally experience in a top steakhouse, and even then not very often.

All the food at Summers is, as inspired by St John, unpretentious and accessible, but not to be confused with "simple". "It costs a lot of money to look this cheap!", Dolly Parton famously said, and it surely takes a huge amount of skill and experience to know what to meddle with and what to leave well alone, to know how to do just enough to let the ingredients sing. This piece of hake was a fish masterclass; a delicate, golden brown skin, a dense, meaty flesh of bright white. It speaks of someone who knows exactly what to do to a good piece of fish but also what not to do, and just leave it there, beaming and brilliant on a bed of foraged seaside succulents.

Desserts are a side of the menu that I'm assured will get more attention and menu space as Summers settles into its space, but even now are off to a fantastic start. Egg tart with rhubarb was a typically St. John and solidly traditional pud, the body-temperature custard framed by a delicate biscuit crust, and the poached rhubarb presented in cute square chunks.

But even better was the strawberry ice cream, a more impressive example I've not found in many years here or abroad. The flavour was so astonishingly concentrated, the hit of jammy summer fruit so overwhelming, that it tasted something close to a sorbet, only a sorbet with that extra luxurious layer of soft, buttery dairy. The last time I ate something as affecting as this was a raspberry sorbet at Little Barwick House in Somerset, and that's probably no coincidence - there, too, was a singularly talented chef making the absolute most of peak summer fruit. Quite a thing. Quite a thing indeed.

With each new exciting opening by a St John alumnus (I've written about two now in the last couple of months) there's the hint of a temptation to get blasé about these things; that as each next corner of our city gets its own delightful little gastropub to call its own that we run the risk of getting used to the idea. Well, good. We should be getting used to the idea. Each corner of London, from Lewisham to Kilburn, from Islington to Stockwell, deserves a Summers - there should be one in every postcode, one pitstop on every commute home from work, somewhere to drink nice wine and enjoy good food and prove that London is the greatest food city on earth, like we always knew it was. And for all this, we have St. John to thank.

9/10

I was invited to Summers and didn't pay

Newman Street Tavern, Fitzrovia

Such is the relentless pace of change - and not just change, progress - of London's restaurants that even that once-great totem of British cuisine, the gastropub, was in danger of looking a bit tired. Many of the old stalwarts (and I won't single any out but if you ever took an interest in eating out in London from around 1995 onwards you'll know which I'm talking about) haven't changed much about the way they're doing things since they first opened, and in the same way as you wouldn't these days consider a Rover Metro a cutting-edge example of automotive design, that non-specifically Mediterranean cous-cous-and-sun-dried-tomatoes gastropub fayre is no longer the advance guard. Once you could pick up a "gastropub" ready meal from Waitrose, the writing was on the chalkboard.

Well, fear not. The times they are a-changing, and like any successful industry, progress is driven by innovation and reinvention. The Newman Street Tavern is, at first glance, just another revamped boozer in Central London serving modern British cuisine, and could have made a very tidy profit just trotting out the usual crowd-pleasers and marking up South African wine. Instead, it quite unexpectedly served me and a couple of friends one of the most interesting and exciting and - crucially - technically impressive meals I can remember eating in W1.

The food NST are cooking isn't, on the face of it, anything completely groundbreaking. It is still Modern British from the St John school, hunks of meat or fish with salad, cottage pie, soups, etc. and so forth. On the one hand it's all quite familiar. But look a bit closer and you'll notice that they aren't playing anything safe - the starters require proper cooking and contain the kinds of words ("wild garlic, "saffron aioli", "cured wild trout") that make you want to bed in and try them all one by one. The mains, too, (token veggie offering aside) use genuinely exciting ingredients like suckling kid and pouting but there are no obvious fillers, no burgers or Caesar salad or anything bulked out with polenta. Yes, there's a steak, and I suppose cottage pie isn't too easy to mess up, but by and large it's a menu that would get anyone - even a shallow, jaded, trend-chasing food blogger like me - salivating.

And it tastes as good as it reads. Crab bisque was packed full of the main ingredient, but still delicate enough to make finishing a bowl of it as easy and pleasurable as drinking a glass of barrel-aged Jura. Devon crab salad (not pictured; I didn't forget but it came out so badly I didn't want to do the chef the disservice of publishing it) again had plenty of crab, but wouldn't have been half as good without a dollop of earthy brown crab mixture by the side. And some "Manilla" (no idea) clams had a good sweet flavour and there were loads of them, although the advertised saffron aioli was subtle bordering on stealthy.

Out of sheer food-bore curiosity I ordered a single gull's egg, having never tried them before and keen to see what all the fuss was about. I hesitate to dismiss them completely as a fad after just the one, but aside from the shocking deep orange colour of the yolk there was nothing out of the ordinary about this at all. Perhaps there are good and bad gull's egg, or perhaps this was the Emperor's New Egg. At £7.50 for a single one, too, I'm not sure I'll bother again.

Mains were all of an equally high quality as the starters. Pork belly came arranged in so much stock it could have been sold as a soup, but fortunately was so intensely, richly flavoured any presentational failings were forgiven. A single large ray wing, as beautifully sculptured as the Sydney Opera House, stood proudly unadorned and the flesh lifted from the cartilage in gleaming white chunks. But best of all (and I would say that as I ordered it) was a combination platter of langoustine and plaice, the plaice in particular tasting better than any fish in recent memory. Yes, the langoustine was a tad under, and the compulsion to dress everything with plain watercress needs a bit of a rethink, but this was still by and large incredibly good stuff.

Desserts - sticky toffee pudding and a rhubarb sorbet - were the only dishes on the menu that leaned slightly towards unimaginative. They weren't bad, but you could tell their energies weren't as focussed on this part of the menu as the savouries. Still, it all got eaten, even if the rather sour sorbet was a bit more of a struggle than the pudding.

Even if Newman Street Tavern represents nothing more than a gradual evolution of the gastropub theme without radically redrawing the map, it's still a fantastic place to have a meal and for not really that much money. But I got the distinct impression that there was more than just a lick of paint and a liberal use of a few seasonal buzzwords on the menu on top of the traditional template. The unapologetically British ingredients, minimalist presentation and unpretentious service are all vaguely familiar to anyone who's eaten at St John Bread & Wine or, say, 32 Great Queen Street but here it was all just that little bit more refined, skilful and - for want of a better word - "modern". And if this is the way things are headed, we've got a whole lot to look forward to.

8/10

One Leicester Street, Covent Garden

It's always sad when a good restaurant dies, but when said restaurant bears the hallowed St John name, the soul-searching is that much more intense. Back in late 2012, when it was revealed that their 3rd outpost would be just off Leicester Square, the news was met with widespread approval; anywhere even half-decent to eat in that part of town is welcome, and what better people to wow the tourists with British cuisine than those who kicked the whole thing off? And when the operation stuttered, stalled and finally collapsed, it's a testament to the goodwill heaped upon the St John brand that people pointed the finger of blame at the area, the building, the clientèle, anything but the business itself.

The unfortunate truth is, though, that the St John thing was never going to work in a poky Georgian townhouse in W1. The cathedral-like atmosphere and whitewashed walls of the ex-smokehouse in Smithfield was - is - a unique and precious gift and eating there is as much about the building as the food. The team did their best to impose that famously minimalist décor on a building that was singularly ill-equipped to cope with it, but it never worked. The restaurant was echoey and impersonal, the hotel rooms boxy and noisy, and the upstairs bar had all the personality of a dentist's waiting room.

And yet, thanks to the priceless pedigree of the Henderson/Gulliver partnership, the food at St John Chinatown was always worth any other discomforts. In the dying days of the previous administration I went in one lunchtime for a plate of snails, duck hearts and lovage, which was lovely enough to distract me from the fact I could hear every word of the conversation on the table next to mine. The good news is that same chef - Tom Harris - is still manning the stoves, only now his food gets served in a room you actually want to be in.

Cockles and Jersey Royals in a saffron/tomato broth was a bowl of joy for £8, and was as good an advertisment for the St John school of cooking as you could wish for. Congratulations are in order, too, for managing to source the most freakishly massive cockles I've ever seen - each was the size of an oyster and packed loads of flavour.

Razor clams would have perhaps been nicer warm, but they were otherwise very good, a minimalist salad of tomatoes and dill highlighting the main ingredient without overwhelming it. Nice to not have a big sack of clam guts to eat around as well, which happens far too often for my liking (hang your head, 10 Greek Street).

Lamb sweetbreads are the kind of things that make me go all wobbly with delight even when only modestly prepared, but here, resting on a bed of artichokes and celery and glazed with a rich, sticky sauce that only the very best chefs can pull off without making treacle, they were nothing short of perfect. If you ever make the trip to 1 Leicester Street yourself, and I strongly suggest you do, you should order the sweetbreads. And thence if you ever go back, you should order them again.

Monkfish and anchovy may have approached the levels of the sweetbreads, too, had they not been unfortunately overcooked and dry. The spice coating on the fish was good, though, and there was an interesting interplay of textures with the breadcrumbs and the crunchy (and slightly scary sounding) "rape greens".

So while not perfect - and how many places are? - 1 Leicester Street has, with the use of skilful remodelling and with the retention of its highly skilled chef, morphed from a Formica'd, clinical space serving nice food to somewhere you could happily spend all day in, munching on oysters and white wine and generally just enjoying life. Oh, and that awful upstairs bar, forever to be filed under "what were they thinking?" in the Big Book of Restaurant Design Car Crashes, is now cozy and stylish, with a kind of 60s James Bond vibe and a counter you can actually sit at. It is a proper, grown-up restaurant, comfortable and confident and gimmick-free. This one's going to stick around.

8/10

Salon, Brixton Market

Objectively, Salon - ostensibly a showcase restaurant for the products sold at the Cannon & Cannon deli - are a very solid little operation serving decent British (or largely British) food in an airy room above Brixton Market and are charging very little money for it. It's possibly unfortunate for them that I made my second trip to Broadway Market and to Sabel this Sunday just gone, who are doing this thing that much better (in fact probably better than anyone else), but if you find yourself near Electric Avenue with £15 burning a hole in your pocket you can certainly do much worse.

N'duja croquettes were an attractive golden brown, had a nice crunch and came perched on blobs of ketchup and surrounded by leaves of chicory. I'd have liked a bit more of a kick from the n'duja, and there was something about the ketchup that felt a bit... low-rent, but I was happy enough to eat them. Which I guess is the point.

Welsh Rarebit was a bit wrong, though - a thick, disconcertingly brown gunk laid on brown bread, grilled too timidly to have any of that nice golden crust you get on a good bit of rarebit (see: St John, Farringdon). Pickled walnuts were a nice touch, but there's only so much bitterly beer-y, salty mixture the consistency of snot you can eat before feeling a bit queasy. We didn't finish it.

Dexter beef - they didn't specify the cut but I'm guessing onglet - had plenty of flavour and was cooked well if you ignore the fact it didn't have a char. It's probably a bit mean criticising a restaurant like this for not having a charcoal grill, as often it's a licensing/extraction issue and out of their hands, but there has never been a bit of beef in the history of the world that isn't better cooked over coals. Still, not bad.

Suffolk chorizo with Jersey Royals was nice too, and oddly enough suffered from the opposite problem as the beef as there was way too much of it all - mainly potato. The chorizo had plenty of punch and bite, and the potatoes were little bouncy balls of flavour, but my friend pointed out that leaving those furry leaves on the radishes has way more benefit to visual aesthetics than taste, and there was quite a bit of salty butter swimming about underneath it all.

Still, all said and done, it was a hearty old lunch for £15 a head and we'd had a nice time. It's great fun, too, looking out over the market while you eat, where, as anyone who's ever been to Brixton Market will know, entertainment in various forms is never in short supply. A marvellously gooey rye, baked fresh that morning, was way better than you usually get as a house bread and, slathered in salty butter, made a fantastic appetiser. So Salon are doing enough right that the odd misstep doesn't matter so much. On the days I don't fancy trekking over to Broadway Market, I will be back.

7/10

Sabel popup, Broadway Market

Many years ago I made it an unwritten policy never to write up one-off events, or supperclubs (and therefore also, by extension, one-off supperclubs). One-off special events are very rarely of interest to anyone outside the most geeky set of food obsessives, and though I certainly count myself amongst that group, I'm not sure how many of the people who read this blog do. It also seemed a bit like bragging - "look at this great meal I went to! What's that, you want to go as well? Well you can't! Haha!" - and I'd rather the blog was mainly a useful database of places you might want to go for your dinner, rather than an exhaustive record of everything I personally ate over the course of a year. Which would be pretty bloody terrifying, for one thing.

Supperclubs are a tricky one, too. I've been to lots of very good ones and a few pretty terrible ones, and if I only wrote up the good it would very soon become clear the glaring omissions were the bad. And although there's no good reason why I couldn't explain in exhaustive detail on these pages everything that was wrong with a meal served by a young couple in their own home in good faith, at cost price and with no other desire than for a random group of strangers to enjoy themselves, you can hopefully understand why I'm not. I may be a bastard, but I'm not evil.

There has been the odd exception, though. Ben Greeno's multi-course spectacular at his old flat in Hackney was worth shouting about for a number of reasons - it was one of the best meals I've ever been served in someone's house, for starters - but now also stands in historical interest as one of the jumping-off points for the Young Turks. Along with James Lowe and Isaac McHale, Greeno had a huge impact on the way restaurant food was heading in London, and now is doing the same for Sydney under the supervision of David Chang.

And now I'm going to break my own rule again because Sabel are also worth shouting about. They are one chef (him), one front of house (her) who most of the time are involved with outside catering and events management, but who every other weekend host a popup in the unlikely location of F Cooke pie'n'mash shop on Broadway Market in Hackney. And yes on the one hand they are just another trendy popup in East London serving Modern British food, but there is something more to these guys.

"Oxtail and smoked bone marrow pie, pickled red cabbage". I challenge you to see that on a menu and not want to order it immediately. It's a wee little thing, but thanks to a delicate golden pastry and a gentle smokey filling, easily satisfied. The sweet clovey pickled red cabbage was top-notch too.

Lamb scrumpets (what a brilliant word) were breaded, deep-fried fingers of lamb, accompanied with a tart redcurrant jelly. Commendably greaseless and using powerfully flavoured meat, they would give pork scratchings a run for their money in a top bar snack competition.

A grilled lettuce and anchovy salad was pretty as a picture. It also sparked off a conversation about how rarely you see grilled lettuce on a menu these days, and how nice it is when done properly. The eggs had precisely soft yolks, the lettuce full of flavour and not too mushy, and some croutons added a good crunch. One of those dishes that is deceptively simple and could easily have been a disaster had not each element been handled perfectly.

Cured sea trout was just as impressive. As with the salad, it superficially seems straightforward - just trout, on a plate, covered in dill-mustard dressing. But the trout was packed with flavour and wonderfully moist, the dressing balancing out the cured fish, and the side of pickled cucumbers was faultless. It also came with a slab of E5 bakehouse sourdough, a product that has never been known to lessen the qualities of a dish.

Then, beef cheek and mash. If you're already fan of beef cheek and mash, then you won't need me to go into too much detail - you'll just need me to tell you that it was a very, very good beef cheek and mash. And if you've not yet had the chance to try beef cheek and mash, then you should book yourself in at Sabel and order theirs immediately. Finally, if you're not the kind of person who can enjoy a chunk of rich, salty slow-cooked beef oozing its dark juices into a dollop of silky, cheese-spiked mashed potato then there is no hope for you, and you may as well just go and live on a commune somewhere and eat lentils.

With everything up to this point being so good, we weren't in the mood to stop there. So Eccles cake and Lancashire cheese provided a neat conjoint between the savoury and sweet courses, room-temperature cheese matched with a golden pastry case so full of gooey sultana mixture it practically exploded when I prodded it with a fork.

But the best, incredibly, was yet to come. An egg custard tart, with an impossibly light-yet-firm pastry base and a filling so expertly judged so as to somehow hold its shape on the plate yet melt away to a liquid in the mouth, was worth the 1 1/2 hour journey to Hackney and then some. It came with a rhubarb and ginger compote thing which, to be honest, it didn't need at all but was nonetheless also a very impressive bit of work.

So there we have it, and hopefully you can see why I think it's been worth a few words. Toby and Lianna are doing their thing on Broadway Market for a couple more weekends (dates here), and then - ah well after that, then things are likely to get quite interesting. They are looking for a permanent site, and anyone with the ability to provide one should be tripping over themselves to help out, because cooking and service of this standard deserves better than a draughty pie shop on Broadway Market. This may be the first, but all being well it almost certainly won't be the last you've heard of Sabel.

9/10

I was invited to review Sabel