Rök: elegantly formed and serving exquisite food

Grace Dent catches Scandi fever at Rök
Changing the face of Nordic cooking: Rök dispatches gorgeous, highly devourable sharing plates of exquisite British produce with a Nordic influence
Grace Dent12 December 2017

Loyal readers may have noticed a certain fractiousness in Grace and Flavour over previous months as I’ve mooched about London in search of great dinner. It is not, I must stress, that I’ve got fussier, but I have certainly became more honest. I do not care, for example, if you’ve invested in a very expensive SousVide machine and your chefs get a boner playing with it — the ensuing lamb will taste of virtually nothing. Furthermore, if a dish is plonked before me that resembles joke-shop sick, I’ve ceased struggling to see its good points. Being honest is very freeing, as well as making for a great cardio workout as now I travel everywhere at double speed with rotting kitchen produce narrowly missing my bouffant.

Two places, however, that I’ve adored this year — which will no doubt be in the 2015 ‘Best of’ list — are Berber & Q in Haggerston and the freshly opened Rök Smokehouse & Bar in Shoreditch. Rök is somewhere between The Old Blue Last and the Queen of Hoxton, which makes it sound like it may be another tedious, cavernous, edgy-by-numbers barbecue joint, which it absolutely is not.

Rök is small — 40 seats — and elegantly formed, dispatching gorgeous, highly devourable sharing plates of exquisite British produce with a Nordic influence. Please don’t go expecting a fully themed Nordic experience with serving staff forced into national dress. This is a British set-up serving British produce, dreamed up by chefs and proprietors who have an adoration of smoking, pickling, brining and that sort of malarkey. I feel the Nordic-Scandi foodie genre could possibly do with a rebranding in many of our minds. It’s either a pretentious chef noodling about with foraged algae and live bees at an idiot-magnet restaurant with a year-long waiting list, or it’s baked cod and Daim bar at an Ikea café, which I tend to order five to six times a year. Ikea are crafty buggers. I swear they pipe malt vinegar through the air-conditioning, cajoling me into eating chips at 10.45am absolutely nowhere near the Billy bookcases.

Rök has revolutionised Nordic for me by serving me a delicious dinner, albeit a British-Nordic one. The meats are cured and smoked at Cobble Lane Cured in Islington, while they pickle their own cucumbers, wild mushrooms, beetroot and other tasty veg. I started with a fine plate of charcuterie and sweetly pickled cauliflower. Matt Young, previously of BarnYard on Charlotte Street, is Rök’s consultant chef and he is responsible for the BarnYard sausage roll, which I once wrote was so good I’d happily marry it.

Irresistible: Rök's plates are a revolution in British-Nordic cooking

In that case I’ll have to make Rök’s smoked short rib of beef, which arrives glistening in birch syrup, my bit on the side. I ate this with a plate of blackened ten-hour charcoal beets turned in whipped goat’s cheese. Rök’s beets are so incomprehensibly blackened it seems on first sight unthinkable that they’re even still edible. But this is a wonderful culinary rouse as within they are sugary and irresistible.

An nduja-wrapped Scotch quail’s egg arrived with a dollop of Dijon mayonnaise. Cauliflower cheese appeared resembling a red velvet cake, sprinkled with beef dust and almonds. Friends say I was an idiot to miss the bone marrow mash with garlic and parsley, but I opted for two lumps of burnt sweet potato with horseradish crème fraîche. A duck leg with bacon and lingonberry jam sat beautifully with possibly my favourite dish, the charred broccoli salad with quinoa, pumpkin and sesame seeds.

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Rök has one pudding and one pudding only. It doesn’t need another as not liking the wood-roasted peach would be an excellent Blade Runner-style test of whether you’re a human being or not. It’s a whole skin-on roasted peach, which tasted ever so slightly of bonfires, festooned with almonds and Laphroaig-infused honey with a dollop of crème fraîche. And now you’re all going to go there and clutter up the place and I’ll be stuck at Ikea with the meatballs. Me and my big mouth.

RÖK SMOKEHOUSE & BAR

1 charcuterie £6

1 cucumber pickle £2.50

1 beef £20

1 charcoal beet salad £5

1 Scotch quail’s egg £3.50

1 cauliflower cheese £5

1 burnt sweet potato £4

1 duck £16

1 charred broccoli salad £5

1 wood roasted peach £6

TOTAL £73

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