Fare review: Thoughtfully modern food and a natty wine list on the Shoreditch frontier

It wasn’t so very long ago that the wine bar seemed defunct. With wine available in every bar and pub, what was the point? Wine bars were closing, not opening.

About six years ago, things changed. In 2013 Michael Sager opened Sager + Wilde with his then-wife Charlotte Wilde, in Hackney Road and wine bars suddenly became cool again. In these pages, self-confessed “cocktails-kind-of-girl” Victoria Stewart ventured there to see if so strange a notion as a wine joint could win her over. It did.

Sager, from a Swiss family, used to run the bar at Milk & Honey, mixing cocktails, but two years in California, including a stint at RN74 in San Francisco, converted him to the grape, giving him a new appreciation of natural wines, made without oak or sulphur, from lesser known regions, not the over-priced classics.

Bringing this approach back to London, starting with a pop-up, he became a leader in the natural wine, or natty wine-drinking, movement, and was awarded UK Sommelier of the Year. He also brought a Californian approach to food, opening a second place, a restaurant, in Bethnal Green, originally named Mission, now Sager + Wilde Paradise Row.

Fare is his new venture, opened a few months ago with his business partner, cult mixologist Marcis Dzelzainis. It’s a bit of everything. There’s coffee from Brixton’s Assembly Coffee, produced from a San Remo Opera 2.0. There’s all-day pizza, from a big Cuppone oven. There are cocktails on draught, innovatively served from an array of taps, adorning a marble-topped horseshoe-shaped central bar. Taptails. Made in batches offsite. Fairly priced.

Wine is on tap too, as well as via a lengthy wine list, featuring lots of bottles in the £35-£90 zone before soaring even higher. And downstairs there’s a spacious restaurant offering a concise menu, overseen by Thomas Raymond, formerly at Ellory.

Fare is located in what Sager reckons to be “the most exciting area of London, where all design is based: web design, architects, branding, you name it”. In other words, it’s on the Clerkenwell/Shoreditch border, the junction between Clerkenwell Road, Old Street, and Goswell Road. On the street level of the big mid-century warehouse block, the Morelands Building, it has fully embraced that look, with floor-to-ceiling Crittall windows, reclaimed Holophane lights, exposed metal beams, Meccano-esque ducts, white walls and foliage plants.

This ground floor is light and airy, with street views; downstairs, it’s a more enclosed feel, despite some light filtering through inset glass floors. Tables are set well apart, capitalising on the big floor space, while the kitchen is discreetly visible through a window, rather than in your face. Lighting at night is dim, Sager being a believer in going dark, which is kind to faces, but makes reading the menu or even seeing what’s on the plate difficult. It softens what otherwise might be quite a severe ambience, though, and we liked the room — despite, the night we went, a party of drinkers. confined within a curious half-height sheep pen, roaring away at the other end.

The starters pleased. Golden beets, with hazelnuts and shavings of Berkswell cheese (£7.50) were tender, earthy and smoky in a good way; confit fennel with smoked butter and Innes goat’s curd (£11) was another take on a similar idea, the fennel just a touch too soft. Good, fresh, sweet clams (£13) had been incorporated into a surprisingly vegetable-rich dish too, coming with green garlic and slices of superior “trombetta” courgettes in an oily sauce.

The mains, although similarly straightforward, were less popular. Katie found her ricotta gnudi (£14), dished up with spring peas, broad beans and “broccolo” (cauliflowerish broccoli), a bit cloying, like a lemony cheesecake. Mark thought his breadcrumbed pork schnitzel (£14) dry and unrewarding, despite the excellent fresh gribiche sauce and white cabbagey salad. Veal might have served better. Might have been vealy, vealy good even.

He liked my “Suffolk lamb shoulder, coco beans, anchovy” more — chunks of unctuous, quite fatty meat with some surprisingly raw anchovy added late, an adaptation of the classic recipe for leg roasted with garlic and anchovy, steeply priced at £22 for this cheaper cut.

We shared a jammy apple tarte Tatin (£10) with a scoop of white miso ice cream, on-trend vanilla as it were, and enjoyed that. This is pleasant enough, unremarkable food, carefully adapted to this locality: thoughtfully modernised but not fanciful, a touch earnest, virtuously sourced, suggestive of sustainability, all that.

Returning for lunch upstairs, the menu seemed to work better for such browsing than as a destination meal. A good sourdough pizza with blobs of Cantal cheese, honey vinegar and black pepper, aromatised with lashings of powdered black truffle and oil (£13) hit the spot.

The wines by the glass are fairly priced too. The cheapest white, a Falanghina from Campania (£5.50), was a great ad for the natty wine approach: fresh and bright, grassy and citrussy. Likewise the fizz, a frizzante bianco from Friuli-Venezia (£5) was ideally light and clean, seeing off your lazy prosecco. Even the “skin” wine, Garnacha Blanca “Lo Pateret”, Catalunya, Celler Frisach (£7) convinced me: rich yellow in colour, rich too in almost sherryish style, while remaining bright and enticing, although perhaps you would not want to drink more than a glass. Only a Vin de France “Wino Rouge” Loire, Les Quatre (£7.50), a cabernet franc-dominated blend, lost me, having that raw acid fruit taste that to me signifies grapes that haven’t actually quite made it into wine.

The investor document for Fare revealed plans to open a couple more sites soon. It was busy both times we visited last week. They’re interesting, the customers here, frontier people, not the full Shoreditch hipster but far from Islington bourgeois, just right for conditions here on the border: thirtyish, well-presented, looking freshly barbered, dressed pretty deliberately too, for such a casual look. Clerkenwell designer is just as distinctive and localised an identity as that of the clubmen of St James’s, a few miles away.

Intriguingly, on Thursday night all the tables in the restaurant save ours were either all-male or all-female. Perhaps these folk reproduce by parthenogenesis?

Five things David ate this week

Another Skye McAlpine recipe at home: gnocchi with a sauce of taleggio and radicchio tardivo. Such a simple combo of cheese and bitter leaf — even better, I thought, when made with easy-to-find red chicory.

Catherine having turned vegetarian, I bravely essayed a Cauldron Lincolnshire sausage — rehydrated textured vegetable protein, seasoned with sage and parsley. Interesting. Momentarily almost like a sausage on first bite, peppery rubber thereafter.

The Turkish monopoly of Green Lanes has been enlivened by an offshoot of Croydon’s much-loved Sri Lankan restaurant Yaalu Yaalu. A spicy slow-cooked goat stew, mirthfully called Spot the Goat, was a treat.

Carluccio’s closed 30 sites last year — but Laurie and I still enjoyed pasta and risotto for lunch at the branch opposite Tate Modern on Friday.

This “burrata datterino” made a pleasingly gloopy starter at a chatty dinner for six authors held by Bodley Head at Balthazar brasserie in Covent Garden last night — only to be followed by a weirdly clove-infested chicken chasseur.