Gilly's Fry Bar, London N4, restaurant review: 'Everything – barring the curry sauce – was exceptionally good'

There’s a special circle in hell, I know, reserved for martini bores. But we just can’t help ourselves. If it’s not mostly gin (or, grudgingly, very good vodka) and bark-dry; if you can’t see the light spearing through it, diamond-hard and titanium-white like a pang of conscience; if it doesn’t swing and sway around its freezing cold glass a little slowly, as if it’s doing a foxtrot to the Nelson Riddle Orchestra – then it’s not a martini.

The espresso martini, an invaluable late-night pick-me-up when you’re out on the town and want to stay there for a while longer, is a proper grown-up drink, a credit to (and a requiem for) the Eighties Soho of its birth – but it’s not a martini.

The “salt and vinegar martini” served at Gilly’s Fry Bar isn’t just a martini: it’s a martini and a half, a queenly, dreamy, sweet-sixteeny martini. If this was a column about martinis, which you could be forgiven for assuming it was if this is your first visit, then we could just slap 10/10 on it and go out for a long walk to clear our heads. But it’s not.

Gilly’s is an odd place, somehow austere and whimsical at the same time: a paean to nostalgia that is also obscurely futuristic. It lurks, a little furtively, in a tough, towny street next to Finsbury Park bus station. A glass front is hand-daubed in white marker with choice menu highlights, rave reviews form the London press (though once again - ahem - we are the first national to pay them a visit) and the cheerful exhortation: “Come In... Get Battered”.

The logo and the menu, frozen on flat-screen televisions on either side of the hardish, brightish interior, and printed on to little A5 slips on which you red-Biro your selections, nod towards a “Golden Age”, a sort of long mid-20th century encompassing Wimpy Bars, Misha Black’s Westminster street signs, Valerie Singleton-era Blue Peter and the Festival of Britain. I half-expected our orders to be taken by a young Terence Stamp.

The food side of the menu is divided laconically into “Fry”, “Raw”, “Snacks”, Side” and “Dessert”. On the drinks side, among other things, there’s a choice of “highballs” ranging from the prosaic (gin and tonic) to the thrillingly outré (“gin, cherry, elderflower, 7-UP”; “tequila, Aperol, Ting”). There’s a tempting house Bloody Mary with dashi, a shot of bourbon with a pickled onion in it – and that martini, made with gin, a lick of seaside-scented manzanilla and a sprig of sweet pickled samphire. “Three of these,” said my friend, a Gilly’s regular since its opening late last summer, leaning forward conspiratorially, “is too many.”

We ordered a plate of raw sea bass, some pickles, a couple of salads, spicy sweetcorn scraps, fried hake, shitake mushrooms and “chips & curry sauce” – that last one any self-respecting North Briton’s answer to Proust’s madeleine (chef-owner Neil Gill is a Geordie, or rather a Mackem – on the counter there’s an immaculately faded photo of what must be quite a rare moment of glory from the heyday of Sunderland FC).

Everything – barring the curry sauce, which I found a little too thick to stick to the chips properly – was exceptionally good. Despite having set up what is in effect a temple to retro fast food, it turns out Gill is a Zen master of the arts of patience, precision and restraint. I appreciate that “Gilly’s Tempura Bar” wouldn’t have had the same ring to it; but this is an Asian restaurant in all but name. 

Having said that, the raw fish was more like a Venetian crudo than Japanese sashimi – cut into thin ribbons, dressed with oil, chilli and finely chopped herbs. But the cooked fish dishes were light and greaseless, and, better still, didn’t have that slimy void you sometimes encounter between the foodstuff and its coating (I was reminded of the popcorn chicken at Good Friends, a supremely good hole-in-the-wall Taiwanese joint on the edge of Chinatown, where the paper bag your chicken comes in remains more or less pristine to the end.)

Pickles were prettily coloured – radish, beetroot, a couple of kinds of carrot – and mellowly fruit-and-veg-ful. The mushrooms were chewy and meaty, their stems disconcertingly if not unpleasingly nipple-like, the tonkatsu sauce on the side a song of remembrance for what my north Walian relatives used to call saws brown. Chips were rustic and peaty.

By now we had forsaken the salt and vinegar martinis – though, in the interests of journalistic objectivity, I essayed a pickled onion shot and found it not half bad, the sweet-and-sourness of the pickle cutting right through the malty miasma of the bourbon. My friend’s husband came along – their children are of an age where they can be left to do their homework for a bit, though there's no guarantee they will actually do it – and ordered some aubergine and haddock. Both of those were pretty good, too.

Suddenly, Gill himself was among us, trying to fix the stereo. It turns out my friends know him a bit - their kids go to school together. He’s not the bearded, tattooed 25-year-old I had imagined, but a handsome man in the early throes of middle age, with a slight look of Terence Stamp about him, as it happens, and a soft, lowing North-Eastern accent. There was more to him than I’d feared, somehow, just as his place was less fun than it had seemed to promise to be, but much better than a “fun” place would have needed to be, if that makes any sense.

I think it does make sense; but I trust we’d all concede that it’s quite a tricky equation to take to the marketplace. Over our three hours in situ (I know!) there had been a steady, quiet to-ing and fro-ing of diners in the room; and a couple of Deliveroo riders, their cuboid insulated backpacks lending them the appearance of pixelated snails in a vintage computer game, had been and gone. But the place remained far from full: the chatter and hilarity that might have sparked up this severe space wasn’t sparking today.

All the same, we loved our dinner – even the ultra-ironic deep-fried Celebrations and mini-doughnuts with which we rounded it off. Three of those would have been too many, too.

4A Clifton Terrace, London N4 3JP 07909 977200; gillysfrybar.com