Bronte, restaurant review: A destination for style plates

Have the wacky scotch egg, the faux-Nando chicken and chips and you’ll do fine, says David Sexton
Designer dishes: a pink concrete bar dominates one of the five Tom Dixon-designed spaces at Bronte
Matt Writtle
David Sexton24 November 2017

Bronte, Bronte... You mean the family of literary cranks from Yorkshire who died so young, possibly partly because the drinking water in the village of Haworth, which had no sewage system, was contaminated both by faecal matter and the run-off from decomposing bodies in the cemetery on the hilltop? Those Brontës? Yum.

No, no — they had an umlaut on the e. This restaurant is named after the Duke of Bronté, il Duca di Bronté of the Kingdom of Sicily. To my shame, despite having raised a glass to his not very long and exceptionally violent life in Burnham Thorpe in Norfolk and inspected the transubstantiated remains of HMS Victory in Portsmouth, I did not know that this Bronté was actually Horatio Nelson, the hero whose 17-foot statue dominates Trafalgar Square from his 170-foot column, fully visible from this restaurant’s colonnaded terrace. How disgusted with me the historian Andrew Roberts will be.

Bronte, on the site of what used to be the ill-favoured Strand Dining Rooms, has been designed by Tom Dixon OBE and his Design Research Studio, his first standalone restaurant since Eclectic in Paris (he also did Sea Containers at Mondrian London, which opened two years ago).

It is quite an amazing design, progressing from the colonnaded terrace, where we had a drink sitting in Dixon’s signature Fan chairs, in the sunshine and the bestial racket of London traffic, through an impressive double-height room, to a quieter, cooler almost aquarium-like dining room at the back. There we ate, feeling quite soothed, apart from the different racket created by a smoothie blender next to us, like a washing machine entering its final spin-cycle frenzy.

Surprising: Prawn and chorizo scotch egg
Matt Writtle

There are five different spaces altogether, 231 covers. Dixon has created some impressive installations specially for Bronte — there’s a phenomenal massive pink concrete breakfast bar, for example and, at the back, a really beautiful drinks bar coated in gleaming pewter (why do people forget the beauty of pewter? “Light is pewter” — P Larkin). The seating is a glorious mix of viridian green leather booths and Scoop chairs, also in pink or black.

Although Dixon may have been the author of the great copper trend of recent years, here he has moved on more to brassy trimmings. The lighting is subtle and uses a lot of his specially designed lights, including Plane (“two interlocked square brass-plated steel frames that enclose a double-layered white glass sphere”); Curve (with a microscopic precision-pierced surface and soft nickel silver coating, Curve “internally reflects and emits a filtered glow of ethereal light”); and the famous teardrop-shaped Fade pendants, which have a metallic finish that graduates from completely reflective to transparent in an even fade along the body of the light. On the tables are lots of his Etch tealight holders in brass, pierced geodesic structures, quite a thing, if that’s your thing.

As if this were not design enough, Bronte has also been construed as a “collector’s house”, “explorer-themed”, featuring “cabinets of curiosities”, displays, some behind glass, others scattered informally around the restaurant. This may be a concept too far. Behind us as we ate was a display of glass paperweights which did not seem to add much except to show just how tasteless glass can be made if you try.

So there: Bronte is a designer restaurant for designer people and we spent some happy moments contemplating them captured at the restaurant’s launch in the always-rewarding ES Magazine’s party-picture section last week.

And the food? Sorry, almost forgot. The menu has been created by Andrew Lassetter and is delivered by Jonathan Villar, who worked previously with fusion maven Peter Gordon. So it is mightily fusioned up, with lots of dragon fruit, paw-paw, kalamansi (acid orange), yuzu, tahini, nam prik, miso, mango, kaffir lime and all the rest of it, listily applied. It gives the impression of luxury holiday hotel food.

During a a short stay at the lavish Soneva Kiri resort on the Thai island of Koh Kood, such food seemed at once exciting and appropriate to me. Here it’s delivered on a budget — Bronte is not at all overpriced — in London, far from the sources of such ingredients, and our reaction to nearly all of it was that it was all right, nice enough, not bad, OK.

From the small plates, octopus, kalamansi, chilli, charred pineapple, thai shallots and mint (£7) was a cold salad, quite fresh, quite nice, nothing remotely comparable to the fantastic charred octopus at Barbary a few weeks ago.

Crab and avocado rice paper wraps, vermicelli noodle, mango, mint, coriander and nam prik (£6) were also cold, slightly slimy rolls with surprisingly little taste of crab or much else, given such a rollcall of ingredients, except that supplied by a heavy dose of nam pla in the dipping sauce.

Better was the chorizo and prawn scotch egg, aleppo chilli sambal (£6). Such has been the showbiz career of the scotch egg in recent years, it was bound to end up here sooner or later — a really strange combination of flavours that worked surprisingly well, lifted by the pool of red sauce in which it sat, with a herby splash of green too.

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From “Salads and Bronte Dishes”, roasted rare beef, paw-paw, cucumber, mint, coriander, green chilli, pickled carrots and ground wild rice (£14) was again a little bit less than completely freshly prepared and a lot less interesting than its list of ingredients promised, a bit dominated by the vinegary pickle.

I ordered peri-peri baby chicken, avocado and orange salad (£14) purely because it seemed such an obvious Nando’s substitute — and it was a tasteful one, the chicken nicely jointed, the sauce not too hot, perfectly satisfactory. Skinny fries, nori and rosemary salt (£5) were good. Fig tarte fine, frangipane and vanilla ice cream (£6) was nice enough too, the pastry quite light.

So have the wacky scotch egg, the faux-Nando chicken and chips and you’ll do fine, and then you can enjoy Tom Dixon’s design as the main event, for not too much money either. The wine list is short and predictable (starting off with El Pico red or white, at £5 a glass and £20 a bottle, described merely as a “blend of Chilean Grapes”, a bit basic even for a corner shop). When I asked if there was any cheese, I was told, no, they had no cheese, alas, not in a merrily Pythonesque spirit.

For food alone we would have just as soon have gone to a Côte or a Turkish grill. More to the point, just around the corner, a 90-second sprint, is Boyd’s Wine Bar and Grill, 8 Northumberland Avenue, which serves classic food and glorious wine in a splendid marble hall. I adore that place, even if it doesn’t have a direct view of the Duke of Bronté. They do have cheese, though.

Open Mon-Thurs 8am-11pm. Fri 8am-midnight, Sat 9am-midnight, Sun 9am-11pm. About £100-£120 for two.

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