Evening Standard
Jimi Famurewa delivered the first verdict on the “unfathomably huge” Canary Wharf follow-up to St James’s Market hit Fallow, and it’s a certified thumbs-up: “Roe is both big and clever,” he declared, “one of the defining, gravity-defying openings of the year.”
The sheer size of the place, he says, is “difficult to overstate” – officially 500 covers plus an outdoor terrace – while the fit-out is “the confirmatory Ferrari on the driveway” that fuels hospitality industry speculation about
the business’s accounts.
Triumphant dishes include a “polyphonic riot of pork scratching-strewn cuttlefish toast”; “mint sauce-doused lamb ribs so succulent and yielding they practically fell off the bone under nothing but a hard stare”; and “the deranged brilliance of a flavoursome, puffed flatbread heaped in barrelling, richly spiced pork and snail vindaloo.”
While the Fallow/Roe founders Jack Croft and Will Murray emphasise the sustainability of their cooking, Jimi is more impressed by their “high-low, quintessentially British approach that is classical in sensibility but irreverent in spirit”.
Jimi Famurewa - 2024-05-19The Guardian
Grace Dent was won over by this new 500-cover operation in Canary Wharf that “is bigger than some former Soviet-era Russian states”, she said, but still manages to hit the gastronomic high notes with a menu that “dances rather daintily and deftly between ‘pub grub’, ‘fever dream’ and ‘Noma’”.
A “marginally less edgy version of Fallow”, its Mayfair parent, Roe specialises in “massive, assertive flavours” that suit its “football pitch” scale, prepared with “geeky precision” in a “heavily populated open kitchen”.
The menu of “crowdpleasers cooked as you’ve never seen them before” ranges from 35-day dry-aged steak with XO mushroom sauce and burger containing both beef and venison, to pillowy flatbreads with various toppings, “rather terrifying-sounding snail vindaloo with mint yoghurt” and a baked potato dish that Grace vowed to eat every time she returns.
Grace Dent - 2024-06-02
