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Keith Miller reviews Bright, London E8: everything is illuminated

Club classic: 'katsu sandos' at Bright
Club classic: 'katsu sandos' at Bright
In brief | Bright
In brief | Bright

Bright – that’s a funny name for a restaurant, you might be thinking – is brought to you by the people behind P Franco, a food-forward wine bar a mile up the road. The latter has been an object of extensive interest to the capital’s food bloggers over the past year or so: partly because its constantly shifting roster of guest chefs has required frequent status updates and front-line dispatches; partly because its cooking facilities consist, in full, of two induction hobs – a perfect, canonical, copper-bottomed example of economy of means yielding extravagance of effect.

The two-hob thing has been critically spun in two different and, you’d think, contradictory ways: as a mark of both a happy, shruggy, improvisatory attitude – let’s do the show right here! – and a square-jawed creative rectitude. I know we off-roaded into art history for a couple of paragraphs last time, so I’ll try not to do so at length again, but a good example of the latter would be the Danish neoclassical sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844) trying to match the purity of the ancients by refusing to deploy drills and other fancy pieces of kit that he believed to have been unavailable to his revered forebears in fifth-century Athens. (That’s why Thorvaldsen wasn’t very good at curly hair, by the way).

Bright London E8
Some day my prints will come: guest chef posters on the wall at Bright

Bright – no, still not feeling the name – appears unhampered by any such less-is-moreish sentiments. A peek into the open kitchen even revealed such baroque wonders as a grill. The room is great, in a slightly hard-edged way: one of those lofty new-build light-industrial spaces, with a lot of glass, a little concrete, some good blond wood furniture and rows of typographically advanced posters, celebrating guest-chef ­residencies at P Franco as though they were seminal club nights.

I’ve never eaten in P Franco. The one time we went there, they told us the kitchen was closed because it was Tuesday, and the guy smiled seraphically as he told us this, as if our not knowing the kitchen was closed on Tuesday marked us out as part of a vanished tribe of prelapsarian holy fools, objects not so much of pity (you get that a lot in these parts) as a certain mystical reverence, to be cherished, caressed and, just maybe, some time towards closing time, ritually sacrificed – so we made our excuses and left.

They are serving grilled turbot, in compliance with the latest Hot New London Restaurants Directive

Anyway, one thing P Franco was celebrated for, or rather one thing they were able to do properly on two induction hobs, was pasta. So at Bright we made sure to try the agnolotti with chicken liver and girolles, served in a fresh, peppery, summery broth, and quite excellent. As, indeed, was pretty much everything else.

They are serving grilled turbot, in compliance with the latest Hot New London Restaurants Directive; but they also do the heads separately, slathered in a fragrant rose harissa, as a “snack”. It’s a messy, slurpy dish (“Very… gelatinous,” said our server, somehow uninspiringly) but there’s a fair amount of white meat to be winkled out of the cheeks and from behind the skull; and once you’ve found that, you’re emboldened to taste parts you might overlook if there were more – the eyes, the tongue.

Bright London E8
Duck hearts with XO sauce at Bright

A plate of grilled broad beans with smoky sesame and some sort of curated yogurt called for a similarly handsy approach. A carb-loaded, mustard-flanked “katsu sando” bush-telegraphed a certain Aussie/Pacific Rim vibe: expect something breezy and informal but tinged with unfamiliarity, it seemed to say (though my sandwichese is a bit rusty).

Dexter sirloin was dry-aged and amazingly full-flavoured – a little rank for some tastes, maybe – with a Trumpian comb-over of golden fat. It came with grated horseradish sprinkled across the top, and sharp pickled blackcurrants. Puddings were outstanding, especially an ice cream flavoured with sweet sake and cut with sour cherries.

There’s a lot of process behind these ostensibly artless plates; a lot of thought behind some of the apparently quixotic choices they’ve made

The menu changes a lot: one dish I’d hoped to try – duck hearts with chef William Gleave’s XO sauce, much lauded since his early stint at P Franco – was off. The rose harissa seems to crop up adorning other foodstuffs according to availability. A glance at their Instagram feed suggests a lot of different pasta dishes in rotation, usually a couple a night. 

What it all has in common is a particular kind of simplicity. Not a River Café simplicity: there’s a lot of process behind these ostensibly artless plates; a lot of ageing and fermenting and culturing; a lot of thought behind some of the apparently quixotic choices they’ve made – if I hadn’t outgrown my hipster-baiting phase, I might have scoffed at the idea of £8 for a grilled fish head, but it’s the one dish I’m really glad we chose; a lot of originality and judgment, trying and testing, behind the sourcing of food and drink (on the booze front we had mossy Argala bitters, headily herbaceous Lo Sang del Pais marcillac and sweet-but-not-too-sweet malvasia – all great).

Bright London E8
Blonds have more fun: Bright

I still don’t like the name, though. Before I went, I was afraid it might augur something cultish: a merry-go-round of enforced illumination, a zoetrope of seraphic smiles – though maybe that’s just an aftershock from my hipster-baiting days. But now I’ve been, it just feels unworthy of the place: a little drab, paradoxically enough, like a lame Nineties band name – or a not-particularly-seminal club night. There’s a lot of daylight in the room, so maybe that’s what it’s about.

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