Sapling review: Startlingly good wine with satisfying food

1/7
David Sexton11 April 2018

Dalston! The very word is like a bell… I lived there in the late 1980s and early 1990s before any of the exciting transformations had occurred that, in 2009, led The Guardian to proclaim E8 the coolest — read, most Grauniad — postcode in Britain.

Although E8-ers today will find it hard to believe, back then there were, save for Faulkners fish and chips and F Cooke’s eel, pie and mash shop, no restaurants, cafés or gastropubs whatsoever within even sloggy walking distance of where we lived. Not one. Not a sausage.

One year some chancer opened a supposedly Italian trattoria on Graham Road. Beside ourselves with excitement, we piled in — and were presented with a “carbonara” of limp fat bacon drowned in off cream — still, after all these years, one of the most horrible meals I have ever eaten. For I did eat it, wanting to encourage. The place closed within weeks.

These days Dalston is a gastro-hub, a crucible of style, not only all around Broadway Market and underneath the arches but even unto Kingsland Waste, a market that in its day specialised in rusty spanners, spavined screwdrivers and used nuts and bolts, if you got lucky.

This is where — in the same stretch that now hosts Rotorino and Chick ’n’ Sours — Robert Ritchie has just opened Sapling, an incredibly soigné “wine-focused restaurant and larder”, in premises that were once a garage and then, in the way of these things, a vegan café, before becoming so fine.

The place has been lovingly created to be its own thing — not another wine bar, not another restaurant leading on its cooking either, but a place to drink vividly good wine with thoroughly satisfying food as an accompaniment, whether well-sourced, simply served meats and cheeses, or appealing little dishes from the kitchen run by John Beeharry, formerly at Bistrotheque.

The interior design, by Ben Masterton-Smith of Transit Studio, couldn’t be prettier. There’s a long central communal table, some booths on the sides, plus a few round tables at the front of the room, amounting to just 34 covers — bookable, mercifully.

All the surfaces have been thoughtfully customised. There are pretty pastel wall tiles made using different crushed London bricks by H&E Smith of Stoke on Trent above attractively treated wood cladding by Havwoods of Clerkenwell — while the bar and table surfaces consist of an entirely new material, Foresso, a new timber-based form of terrazzo developed by designer Conor Taylor for Solomon & Wu.

Raid the larder: Food doesn't take a back seat 
Matt Writtle

These visual and tactile pleasures are completed by blue velvet-covered chairs and coppery, unemphatic lighting. It feels equally easy as a place to be in on your own, in a group, or as a couple, a comfort few bars achieve.

Sommelier is slightly too formal a word for Dan Whine (yep) who is, in the most relaxed way, just infectiously enthusiastic about all the wines he has to offer, a fast-changing selection of 30 or so from the many more cellared below the restaurant, all of them available by the 125ml glass, at one-sixth of the price of the full bottle — thanks to the use of the Coravin system which allows wine to be taken from a bottle without uncorking it.

The list, concise but informatively annotated, reveals that, as must be more or less compulsory in New Dalston, the emphasis is on organic, biodynamic, natural and minimal intervention wines. In my experience — as, for example, on a vaunted tasting menu at Ellory, over the road in Netil House — many of these virtuous creations turn out to be, however singing their bouquet, dismayingly thin, light, sharp and unbalanced in the mouth, sometimes oddly fermented or even oxidised, almost a penitential commitment.

Not here. Whine emphasises that he likes his wines clean — and every one I tasted was startlingly good, as if adding a whole new dimension to ordinary expectations.

David Sexton's week in food

For Saturday lunch I made gnocchi with crab and baby tomatoes from Skye McAlpine’s new book A Table in Venice (via a newspaper cutting anyway). A yummy alternative to extending crab with linguine. And she’s right — you need lots of Parmesan, improbably.

On Sunday, a few Colchester oysters from the farmers’ market, pictured. Rocks. I intend to eat nothing but natives but the flesh is weak.

For Sunday supper, last of the winter’s frozen partridges, with pancetta, truffle oil and polenta. Looking forward to spring: it continues to rain, though.

On and off all week, our household staple is a simple, long-simmered, beef-only bolognese with pasta, the baby’s favourite. The trick is to slop in at least half a bottle of strong red wine, such as the Utiel-Requena, rejoicing in the name of El Macho, that Iceland sells dirt cheap. 

Post-Easter catch-up lunch with Katie in Wagamama in Kensington on Monday: chicken ramen in a stock so feeble it might well have been made by washing up the dishes of previous customers.

A Gamay Noir, Les Frères Danancher, Macon Burgy, 2016 (£6.50 a glass) was purest, vibrant fruit, absolutely delectable, an essence of the grape. A sought-after Grenache, S C Pannell from McLaren Vale, 2009 (£10.30) was wonderfully silky and powerfully scented, with that tarry undertow of even the most expressive Australian wines.

Most surprising was Temuri Dakishvili, Vita Vinea, 2015, Kakheti, from Georgia (£7), made at 400m height in the foothills of the Caucasus, from the indigenous Sapreravi grape, fermented and then aged in “qvevri”, handmade clay amphorae, in the manner in which wine was made thousands of years ago — but it’s no museum piece, rich, heady, alive with balanced tannins, quite a revelation, an ancient taste, profound, almost creaturely. This works out at £42 a bottle — but you’d be denying yourself needlessly if you don’t experiment by the glass here.

And the food? The food supports the wines generously, not over-ambitious, not over-stated. Parmesan gougères (£3.50) was four decadent pastry puffs with a dollop of wild garlic-scented cream. Jersey Royals with cheese curd, monk’s beard and pangritata (fried breadcrumbs) for £3.80 made for a sturdy background to a glass. Dexter beef tartare, with egg yolk and a grating of Ossau cheese (£12) was great beef (Ritchie grew up on a farm), the meat softened with some milk and then delicately peppered, giving such a clarity of taste it makes you wonder why anybody would ever prefer a burger.

The larder features local treats like Hackney Secret Smokehouse smoked salmon and Black Hand charcuterie. Dark slices of West Country air-dried smoked mutton, £5.40, spiced with juniper and served with gherkins, were terrific — Prince Charles would be so pleased —while the eight seasonal cheeses, sourced from La Fromagerie, seem to have remarkably little mark- up at £3-£4 for a good serving of each.

So here’s a brilliantly conceived, devotedly delivered, mini-palais of taste and pleasure that would grace any quarter, bang on Kingsland Waste. Twenty years ago it would have been an unthinkable interpolation — now it looks like it’s in just the right place.

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