Barnyard - restaurant review

The standard of cooking at Barnyard, superstar chef Ollie Dabbous' new restaurant, is high — so it’s a shame to bolt and run, says Nick Curtis
Americana for the cool crowd: Barnyard in Fitzrovia
Nick Curtis @nickcurtis18 December 2014

Oof! Bit of indigestion today. It’s more my fault than Barnyard’s, though. Let me explain. This tiny, friendly hutch of reclaimed wood and corrugated iron Americana on Charlotte Street is the second venture of superstar chef Ollie Dabbous and his business partner Oskar Kinsberg, a companion and complement to the achingly refined and hard-to-get-into Dabbous nearby. Barnyard serves upscale comfort food and smartened-up diner dishes alongside artful drinks. There are wings and waffles, corn bread and barbecued short ribs, shakes served in milk bottles with or without a slug of booze and half-pint cocktails masquerading as “shandies”.

The look and the menu are resolutely of the moment, as are the solicitous, hirsute, lumberjack-shirted staff — perhaps daringly so, considering how soon hipsterfication may jump the shark. The no-bookings policy, added to the Dabbous cachet, seemed to suggest a long wait for a table would be in order.

Queues can, indeed, apparently last up to three hours here but on arrival I was shown straight to the huge oblong bar that, along with a mid-sized tree, dominates the space. A stream of more or less trendy youths (including, I swear, one chap dressed as a Tyrolean goat-herd) steadily filled the scattering of tables in front and on the rear mezzanine but when my wife arrived we were still shown straight through. By then, in a bid to interrogate the drinks list, I’d already had a Barnyard Iced Tea, an invigorating blend of English tea, pink grapefruit, lemon, agave, whisky and beer, which nicely took the edge off the working day, followed by a thick malt milkshake with a shot of bourbon: an alcoholic’s nursery meal in itself.

Wholesome fare to belt you in the tastebuds: roast beef, bread and a corn-cob upended in a mug

Chef Joseph Woodland was formerly at The Square and Launceston Place but has here devised a more modish menu consisting of small plates (utilitarian enamel ones) grouped together by food type: pig, cow, beef, eggs, vegetables and sides. This is not a place to come if you want to lose a few pounds or pace yourself: everything comes at once and the tables turn quickly. This is hoedown, chow-down food, the culinary equivalent of the Rolling Stones and Kings of Leon songs playing throughout. The homemade sausage roll with piccalilli looked pinkly appetising on a neighbouring table but we chose lard on toast as our piggy component, a deliciously smarmy dollop of umami on airy, thin-sliced and crisply grilled ciabatta. Simple but stand-out.

From the bovine tranche of the menu, the barbecued grain-fed short rib was a tender oblong of meat, as precise as a Mars bar, its flavour intense but diminishing as it cooled, though enlivened by a dollop of mustard and black treacle. The prosaically frank mince and dumpling was a rather better attempt to recall the flavours of post-school high tea than the mince and potatoes at the Dean Street Hotel — the dumpling pillowy but yielding enough to take on gravy that had a tang of onion sweetness. Chicken wings with smoked paprika, garlic and lemon were piquant, zesty and succulent, and left a slick of grease on the chin. I needed some wet wipes.

Everywhere there are new flavours waiting to belt you in the tastebuds. Charred broccoli vinaigrette was excitingly sharp on the first mouthful, a bit too much by the third. Meadowsweet seasoning added interest to the single corn-cob that came upended in a mug and impaled on a steel bolt: but we couldn’t finish it. The warm corn bread, served in a date-stamped paper bag, was as sweet as sponge cake. Broken eggs with mushrooms, garlic and parsley were, uniquely, drastically underseasoned, a bowlful of surrender.

What was needed was something to undercut the fulsome richness but even the hispi cabbage comes with clover and the chicory salad with lovage, mint and lemon. Only four wines are offered by the bottle or glass but a young, astringent 2013 Spanish Candidato and the 2012 Sicilian Pieno Sud were robust enough to hold their own.

Puddings were not strictly necessary but acorn flour in the making and malt in the chocolate sauce made the waffle, unusually in my experience, taste different to a bath sponge. Popcorn ice cream with smoked fudge sauce was an extraordinary combination of flavours and textures, though. Barnyard is buzzy, friendly, fast, calorific: we felt that by dawdling we were running counter to the spirit of the place. The standard of cooking is high, so it’s a shame to bolt and run, though the limited number of covers clearly makes this desirable to Dabbous and co. I thought all this out while sucking on a Rennie at 2am. Next time, maybe I’ll skip the milkshake.

18 Charlotte Street, W1(020 7580 3842, barnyard-london.com), no bookings. Mon-Sat 12pm-12am, Sun 12pm-4pm. A meal for two with drinks, about £86 excluding service.

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