We’d heard some good things about the sandwiches and smoothies at the Krüger take-away operations, so we thought its eat-in dining facility might be worth checking out. Part of a privately-run venture, we hoped it might stand out against the nondescript backdrop of dining on the Wharf (which is almost invariably overhung by the dead hand of Big Business).
It’s certainly a good-looking space, inspired perhaps by the Canteen (at Spitalfields, and now also at the Royal Festival Hall) – the concept whose low-key modernist styling has helped make it quite a darling of the foodie media, and pretty popular with the punters too.
Here, however, there’s no earnest retro-Britishness about the short menu, which is in the ragbag style you might call international brasserie classics. There’s nothing (particularly) wrong with that, but the difficulty with classic dishes is that there’s not much scope for error, because everyone’s pretty clear about how they ought to be.
A crab cake, for example, should not have the look and feel of falafel. Chips should be crisp. A medium rare burger should not be grey all through And a lemon tart should not have shrunk away from all its edges, and be encased in pastry so flabby it almost seemed not to have seen an oven. Our meal, in short, was uniformly turgid: a fill-up for the troops, but not somewhere we can imagine seeking out for pleasure.
If we really did have to choose a Wharf rendezvous for pleasure, we think we’d at least want the possibility of a good stiff drink. This- sadly – is not among the options here.
