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Morchella is a new restaurant from the team at Perilla, a restaurant in Newington Green that I reviewed about eight years ago and have been watching ever since. Actually, “watching” is too passive a term. I thought at the time that chef Ben Marks was a notable talent, and I’ve been hiding behind the bins opposite his house ever since with a pair of binoculars and a notebook. Now they’ve opened a new restaurant/wine bar just off Exmouth Market in the surprisingly beautiful hall of a Victorian bank.
There is something amazing about buildings that were created way back when people thought things would last forever. Banking halls, huge pubs out at what used to be the end of the tram line, Masonic halls, seamen’s missions. The Victorians built them as timeless reminders of human achievement and aspiration. Now time has rendered high street banks redundant, I love it when we repurpose them for hospitality, the only pure human virtue of any note that persists. I just pray I never have to write about a promising noodle shop in what used to be a school, or a natural wine bar in a public library. A hundred metres from Morchella is a health centre designed by Berthold Lubetkin in the glaring optimism of the 1930s. Every time I walk past it, I’m nearly sick with trepidation.
Morchella is worthy of an inspiring space. More, in fact. Morchella is one of the very few restaurants where you know within seconds of walking in that this is going to be a good one.
There are lots of intangibles, like the vibe (simple, scrubbed, mid-century modern meets Hackney craft carpentry), and the warmth of the welcome. But the bread, a seaweed-flavoured focaccia, is very tangible indeed. The open, bubbly texture of a high-hydration sourdough, shaped as a boule rather than the traditional flat slab, bespeaking of a baker who can coax a bucket of wet dough to hold shape. It tastes sublime. It reminds you why we use the term “to break bread”. And it tells you with the first mouthful that this is going to be a good evening.
I’m so unable to resist vitello tonnato that I feel I should either issue a blanket apology or just write a sensitive monograph called something like “Nourish Me with Tonnato” in which I compare and contrast every one I’ve eaten. This one was a conceptual gear change. There’s still a wafer-thin sheet of poached veal, but it’s wrapped around a bunch of leaves and a large dollop of tuna salad, and it’s sublime.
Prawn pil pil is a common enough bar snack throughout the Basque region, in which the crustacea are poached in a garlicky oil which is then emulsified. It’s a fascinating little niche of Mediterranean cookery with elements of bouillabaisse boiling and aioli pounding, resulting in a uniquely greasy ointment of a sauce. Here, Marks has done it with mussels, which obviously ups the fishy flavour, thus enabling him to heave in smoked paprika. It’s a balancing act, but he carries it off. That in itself is an achievement, but what happens next, as they say on the internet, “will shock you”.
The poached mussel is laid on a cube of that amazing focaccia and drenched in the sauce. It’s all over the bivalve, drizzling into a pool on the plate and soaking back up into the bread. It is breathtaking. I think that’s the right word, given I was stuffing it in so eagerly I forgot to breathe.
It was at the spicier end of things legally served in restaurants, so I followed it with a bowl of cool stracciatella only marginally more set than a yoghurt, topped with Vesuvian tomato and a very seasonal peach. Once again, Marks shows balletic balance. There’s quite a lot of sweet in the bowl and the “cheese” is pretty neutral. Keeping this savoury displays a consummate palate.
By this point, I’m on a roll. They’ve got fresh ingredients sorted, they’re concentrating on a kind of pan-Mediterranean cuisine I instinctively love, and the kitchen is absolutely aflame with creativity. I note with joy that they feature an “extensive old world wine list” so shift up to a fresh spider crab.
What’s most noticeable here is not purely the flavour, but superb physical engineering. It’s served in the scrubbed upturned carapace, which is particularly beautiful. The top is a thick layer of white meat, carefully flaked and strewn and concealing a cream of the darker meat, intense and brooding. But the cucumber isn’t shredded like some mimsy garniture. It’s peeled, deseeded and then stirred through the dark meat in cubes, about a centimetre in size. Those chunks, cool and crunchy, attenuate the fish funk, leaven the richness, add texture and infinite variety. Across the top there’s a loose tracery of thin chilli slices, chosen for fruitiness beyond simple heat.
Space forbids me to wax as purple as I might over a cazuela of spinach and chickpeas, stewed in oil and then topped with egg, a small but perfect spaghetti vongole, hake in a sobrasada sauce that could strip paint, and a triangle of slow-cooked pork jowl topped with a shard of crackling and a veil of membrillo.
All that must be rushed so I can tell you instead about a thin square of Gorgonzola dolce served with a layer of finely sliced kumquats “mostarda”, quite the best thing as a sort of cheese/pre-dessert. And then a lemon verbena panna cotta, topped with new season apricots that taste precisely like the time you had apricot jam on a baguette, the very first time you went to France.
I think my mission is complete. This is how I want to eat forever. I’m leaving the dustbins and moving into Morchella.
Morchella
84-86 Rosebery Avenue, London EC1R 4QY; 0207 916 0492; morchelladining.co.uk
Starters: £6-£18
Small plates: £13-£23
Mains: £34-£49
Follow Tim @TimHayward and email him at tim.hayward@ft.com
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