Evening Standard
David Ellis reviewed a “new Irish-British bistro open only for lunch, specifically lengthy, boozy ones” – although he sniffed at the idea that a proper long lunch was possible in the 12 noon-2pm time-slot he was allocated.
Even so, he warmed to the archly retro atmosphere of the set-up – booking by phone, cash-only payments, and Belfast-born chef/co-proprietor Hugh Corcoran’s very personal opening gambit of asking “Now, would you like a drink?” rather than handing over a conventional list.
The food also had “a touch of the 1982s” about it, and the choice was pretty limited, especially for veggies, while the quality of the cooking varied from “sometimes middling” (in dishes that were under-seasoned) to “very good leek and potato soup” and a “guinea fowl pie with a thick suet crust, plenty of bacon and excellent leeks”.
David’s verdict? For all its shortcomings and eccentricities, “I loved it here, adored it… I get it. But you might not.”
David Ellis - 2024-11-03The Observer
Jay Rayner headed to this lunch-only spot a few days before the furore over non-drinking, starters-only customers exploded across the media (see below). Less than a week after it opened, it was already a place of pilgrimage that had attracted a party of chefs from Noma in Copenhagen and our own venerable Fergus & Margot Henderson (of St John & Rochelle Canteen respectively).
Jay clearly approved of Belfast-born founder Hugh Corcoran’s affiliation to the tribe of “chef poets” (as opposed to “tweezer chefs, dude-food chefs or live-fire chefs”), both in naming the restaurant with reference to a 17th-century Gaelic poem and in his romantic attachment to simplicity, to ingredients and to the writings of Elizabeth David and Richard Olney.
The food was “delightful” at its best, with hits including nutty soda bread served with wedges of yellow butter, “neatly tucked” guinea-fowl pies and a “huge glossy, quilted disc of apple pie for dessert” – all of which “make the point about simplicity’s virtues well”. But a “dreary” leek and potato soup, a bowl of “bought-in Cumberland sausages” with potatoes listed as ‘Dublin Coddle’, and a “sludgy” rice pudding served cold all took simplicity too far, and left guests “muttering about having been served school dinners, only at Hackney natural wine bar prices”.
For Jay, there was a big, even comic contradiction about the whole venture. It “sells itself as cool and radical”, having “scythed away at the fripperies of the 21st century, such as credit card payments and a website”, while Corcoran is an avowed Communist with a poster of Lenin on the wall – but what the restaurant actually plays to is “the small-c conservatism of John Major’s wistful speech about a fantasy England of ‘warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and – as George Orwell said – old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist’.”
Jay Rayner - 2024-11-17The Times
Giles Coren chipped in his tuppence-worth on this lunch-only restaurant whose chef-patron, Hugh Corcoran, is basking in his five minutes of fame after complaining about tap-water-drinking, starter-sharing customers (although Giles insists that he visited before the whole brouhaha blew up).
Giles rather warmed to the “young, bearded, rubicund, seriocomic” Corcoran, and even indulged his insistence on serving natural wines, which usually drive Giles nuts. As for the food, “there was nothing there that I would have been especially proud to have cooked myself… but nothing that was beneath my eating.” He awarded it a lowly score of 4 out of 10.
Giles also managed – accidentally on purpose, you might think – to forget the Bittern’s cash-only policy, and of course the nearest cash machine was out of action. But the restaurant took a bank transfer from his phone – “they were very nice about it” – which rather spoilt the whole point of the cash thing.
“And for the record, I thoroughly approve of the Yellow Bittern. In a world of bland crap, global chains, celebrity chefs, tasting menus, online reservations, inclusive service, TopJaw, small plates and multizillion-dollar refurbs, I think a bunch of Irish kids round the back of King’s Cross saying, ‘Screw yous, this is how we do it,’ is the most refreshing thing I’ve seen in years.”
Giles Coren - 2024-11-24The Times
In one of his final pieces as restaurant critic at the FT, before shifting over to become the paper’s food writer, Tim Hayward posted a non-review of the Yellow Bittern, the lunch-only, no internet and no card payments venue on the Caledonian Road that caused much debate when it opened late last year.
For the record, Tim his eaten there, plans to return regularly, and rates its outspoken co-founder Hugh Corcoran as “an outstanding chef”. But “no, I won’t be reviewing The Yellow Bittern”, he said. Instead, he treated us to a cod-structuralist analysis of its attractions.
The restaurant’s retro appeal – “it looks like a carefully curated set for a working-class eating establishment in about 1930” – had been sneered at as “cosplay”, Tim reported. But he flipped this to argue that instead of “mimsy nostalgia”, the YB represented a very contemporary – possibly ahead-of-its-time – commitment to “immersion”.
After all, he said, all restaurants are businesses that depend on creating the illusion of hospitality – and at the YB he can believe, for the duration of lunch, that this is a restaurant “where true hospitality, rather than profit, is the motive”.
Tim Hayward - 2025-03-02
