Grace Dent reviews St John's Tavern

Grace Dent wants to keep Holloway’s St John’s Tavern all to herself
Grace Dent26 July 2013

Of late I’ve been buzzing mostly around central-ish tried-and-trusted locations. Lobster spaghetti at Scott’s on a Friday night is a very cheering affair. So, too, the combination of a balmy Thursday evening with squid, entrecôte and a bottle of Lordina Granit at Pizarro. I have yet to be touched by the 5:2 Diet craze. Ironically, anywhere between two and five seconds is how long I permit any tedious, starved windbag to describe ‘fasting days’ before placing a finger to their lips and whispering, ‘Gracie bored now.’ One can tell 5:2 victims by their sheer inability to deal with London life during days on which their calorie plan permits one San Marzano plum tomato and moving the same unpaid invoice around their desk in a 360-degree circle, for eight hours, while fantasising that the intern is made of ham.

Another wonderful place I’ve found to not be on a diet is the St John’s Tavern on Junction Road, Upper Holloway. I hesitate to write about this great gastropub, with its good service and imaginative, well-delivered menu, as a lot of you might come here, and although the majority of you are smashing, upright citizens, I am sure some of you are trilby-wearing savages with bawling offspring called Noah and Persephone who we’d all prefer went to Giraffe. To the bleak tribe who sat beside me in one of my favourite East London beer gardens last week and gave their child a deflated mini rugby ball to practise dispersing gravel into everyone’s pints with, I have two words to say: Wacky Warehouse.

As yet, St John’s Tavern is only filled with lovely people like you and me. Until I discovered it, my main memories of eating in Holloway were Friday nights in the 1990s at the Indian Ocean Tandoori, and more recently I’ve been eating at that delicious hidden gem on Hercules Street, Chicks on Fire, a restaurant that should get some sort of Grace and Flavour prize for combining the best food with the worst restaurant name invented in the last century. Chicks on Fire’s logo is a sexy chicken dressed as Marilyn Monroe with her skirt blowing up displaying her sexy marinated thighs.

No such problems with St John’s Tavern, for this is a solid, dependable name describing a perfectly affable London boozer that serves dependably great meals in its large dining room and small, perfectly formed beer garden.

The sourdough bread always disappears far too quickly and the jellied pig’s head with beetroot purée and pickled green apple, the pickled cockles or Dorset snails with spinach tagliatelle are often my starters of choice. For shared tables a good, solid bet is the St John’s charcuterie with homemade celeriac remoulade on rustic tomato toast. St John’s also offers proper heartening bar snacks, to mop up your summer boozing, such as giant Scotch eggs, sausage rolls, lamb pasties, salt cod croquettes and a very good whitebait with devilled aïoli that changed my view of whitebait forever. For mains, burgers, fish and chips and shepherd’s pie are often available, but there are also more offbeat affairs such as silver mullet with samphire and green bean and fennel salad, or chargrilled octopus, chickpeas, rocket and roast peppers.

I like St John’s bid to give vegetarians something proper to get their teeth around. The breaded haloumi with squash, beetroot and broccoli in a tomato, chilli and chive oil is one of my favourite dinners right now. This is one of those boozers one can turn up to for lunch on a quick emergency mission to catch up with a friend and then simply lose yourself in a hidden corner of North London and graze in finery at all day. They do oysters and caviar for crying out loud. Not that I’d encourage all-day boozing. Perhaps you could come on a 5:2 day and have a glass of gently carbonated Badoit and stare sadly at a Sudoku puzzle. I’ll leave that up to you.

St John's Tavern, 91 Junction Road, N19 5QU, 0207 7272 1587, stjohnstavern.com

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in

MORE ABOUT