Clerkenwell is not just one of London’s more attractive emerging areas, it is also home – not entirely coincidentally – to a good number of the better mid-price restaurants. So there’s clearly plenty of custom round here. If, however, a new concept doesn’t immediately click – witness the defunct Xich-lo, a few doors from the new Larder – you won’t get long to sort it out.
Larder is a much better concept than Xich-lo was, and we’d like it to succeed. The idea is that it’s an informal all-day bakery-cum-brasserie, where you can have anything from an open-sandwich lunch to a full meal. Nicely pitched for the informal Clerkenwell crowd, you might think. But even trendy, trainer-wearing lunchers have timetables, and they want their meal to run smoothly. Our service – in a restaurant that had been running for several weeks, and was at most a quarter full – just didn’t. It wasn’t awful, and it didn’t lack charm. But it wasn’t at all slick.
Could the food make the place special? If it’s good enough, the world will – well, may – beat a path to your door. We did in fact have one ‘historic’ dish, a strawberry millefeuille, but everything else was pitched somewhere round ‘good’.
Perhaps ambience could tip the balance? The interior here is very rough-hewn and brown. On a smaller scale it could have seemed cosy and rustic. Or perhaps Scandinavian-arty. But the problem here is that the space is so large and so four-square you’d need to get half of Clerkenwell in here to get the feeling that the place was really buzzing.
And unless they get that service sorted out we’d guess that ain’t going to happen.
