Treves & Hyde At Leman Locke, restaurant review: Plates for the Masterchef generation

Head chef George Tannock has created a menu of real taste, letting his ingredients speak for themselves, says David Sexton, it's just a shame the presentation is so fussy
Deconstructed Scandi: the bright dining room at Treves & Hyde
Adrian Lourie
David Sexton21 November 2017

Knowing what to do with the restaurant in a big hotel has always been a bit of a conundrum. (Strange now to think that that’s what Jan Morris called her pioneering 1974 memoir of transitioning from male to female, “a riddle turning on some odd or fanciful resemblance between things quite unlike” — still, at least she didn’t choose “chimera”, a word best not looked up.)

On the one hand, any self-respecting hotel demands an impressive statement of its stature and fashionability as a fine dining destination for people not staying there. On the other, such an arrangement doesn’t well serve the needs of those staying there, who want to eat much less ambitiously most of the time or, to put it another way, not feel permanently unwell. The common solution to this conundrum is to have a second, cheaper bistro or café.

Aparthotels provide a different challenge. A good deal of the appeal of aparthotels is precisely that many travellers find being forced to eat out all the time expensive and irksome. Having a kitchen liberates them from that obligation. Yet even aparthotels need a restaurant too, one that is not offering home cooking yet somehow fits with the home-from-home ethos.

SACO, the Serviced Apartment Company, a business founded in Bristol in 1997, now operates more than 900 apartments in the UK, including in Cannon Street, Fitzrovia, Canary Wharf, Covent Garden, Holborn and Waterloo, and 80,000 around the world.

Real taste: asparagus, egg yolk, morels and wild garlic
Adrian Lourie

SACO’s new brand, “Locke” — apparently named after the Enlightenment philosopher who thought we were born blank slates, bless him — aims to combine “the comfort and flexibility of service apartments with the design of a boutique hotel”. Leman Locke is the first such place, a glassy 22-floor tower containing 105 studios and 63 one-bedroom suites, meeting rooms, a gym and, at its foot, a restaurant.

The idea is that travellers no longer just want comfort and efficiency, they want to feel part of the local community in “a space where like-minded travellers and locals can meet, work, play, share and live” (good, that permissive “live”). In the case of Leman Locke, what’s on offer is allegedly being “in the heart of London’s East End, within minutes of London’s most creative and vibrant areas of Shoreditch, Hoxton and Hackney”.

While it’s true that you might be within minutes of them, traffic permitting, helicopters assisting, Leman Street itself is a charmless thoroughfare in Whitechapel, heading south from Aldgate East. Never mind. The rooms have been trendily designed with pink L-shaped sofas by New York architects Grzywinski + Pons while the kitchens — “fit for a master chef”, aye aye — come equipped with not just Smeg appliances but Hemsley & Hemsley hectoring cookbooks.

Sumptuous: valrhona chocolate, tarocco orange and pistachio
Adrian Lourie

Supplying the diner to supplement this glory is Hyde Restaurants, created by Scott Ward, former MD of L’Anima in Broadgate. Bravely, Treves & Hyde has ventured forth onto the pavement under the hotel, with seating, plants and parasols, although this area still feels bleak and dwarfed by the looming towers. Inside there’s a café-cum-bar and a metal spiral staircase up to the first-floor restaurant.

The room is floor-to-ceiling glazed on three sides. It has a nice mix of textures — bare oak, polished concrete, pale orange upholstery, iron and brass fittings, plus a fair amount of vegetation, including Swiss cheese plants in terracotta pots. It’s all vaguely Scandi and slightly clubby, highly designed to look a little deconstructed. It’s just a shame that the street it looks over is so stark and unrewarding.

The head chef is George Tannock, who has quite the formation, starting at the Dorchester and taking in stints with Heston Blumenthal at The Fat Duck, Eric Chavot at The Capital and at Zuma. He’s good and lets his ingredients speak for themselves, a real feat since the presentation of the food here is MasterChef-meaningless-fussy, no doubt obligatory now, especially in a boutiquey context like this. After zillions of episodes of this fatuous and harmful programme, nearly every restaurant diner now believes she has been shortchanged unless there’s a ludicrous construction and multiplication of ingredients on the plate, more or less regardless of taste. Cooking used not to be like this. It’s a blight.

30 must-try dishes in London restaurants

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From the starters, seared tuna, edamame, carrot and nori seaweed crisp (£11) was excellent, a generous serving of tuna, the puréed carrot unexpectedly turned into cubes of quasi-tofu, nicely contrasting textures, all moistened with a little white miso.

Sheep’s ricotta (£7.60) was a subtly smoked, otherwise quite bland mound of cheese, swimming in a pleasantly tart green jus, whipped up from celery, cucumber and green apple, a little olive oil and a figgy vinegar, the whole surmounted by a sail of crispbread.

The vegetarian main was also quite plain, a baked heritage beetroot (£12.50), pale coloured but impressively sweet and earthy, accompanied by the inevitable calçot onion and some pumpkin oil and seeds, plus an unnecessary foam of almond milk.

David Sexton's week in food

1. Stopping off at a book launch, en route to a soft opening, I sampled... no, I didn’t. I’ve been heading straight home to cook. Everything Catherine so carefully avoided for the past nine months, we’ve been rejoicing in again.  For Saturday lunch, by tradition, it’s linguine with Steve Hatt’s clams.

2. In the evening, tuna sashimi, cut from a steak from Hatt with the sharpest knife I have ever owned, the Artisan 150 utility, £179, from the Japanese Knife Company.  

3. Sunday being so springy, I made Ruth Rogers’s pea, ricotta and lemon zest risotto, recently reprinted in a mag, for lunch: some of the peas were dutifully sprung from pods, others from Iceland.

4. In the evening, a little Staub casserole of chicken thighs and button mushrooms in white wine and stock: I love making stock so much that I cook some dishes just to help me use it up.

5. On Monday evening, blue cheese again at last. A simple Roquefort/chicory/pear and walnut salad. If you are making this properly, Raymond Blanc’s recipe, emulsifying some of the cheese into the oil, is more refined. But simple is good.

Cod, cockles and kale, polenta, beer-pickled shallots (£16.50) was generous, a good steak of cod, reportedly straight up from Brighton, topped with tangy cockles, surrounded by some helpful greenery and loose polenta turned purple by puréed wild rice.

Paprika smoked chips (£4.50) were great; tenderstem broccoli with dashi vinegar (£6) was good, except the dish was adorned with katsuoboshi, large shavings of sourly inedible dried bonito, which added nothing except the curiosity of moving and flexing as if alive as they reacted to the heat and moisture.

Heroically, Treves & Hyde (is that Frederick Treves, who treated the Elephant Man nearby, playing Dr Jekyll?) offers only two desserts: butterscotch crème caramel in a mini-Kilner jar, waggishly topped with salty popcorn (£5.80), not special, and a sumptuous log of dense Valrhona chocolate (£8.50) accompanied by a delicious scoop of pistachio ice cream (and, of course, scattered pistachios), plus a few morsels of refreshing tarocco blood orange.

The wine list is promising enough but the glasses are idiotic, straight-edged ridged cylinders, chiming with the decor but denying anything but a New World blockbuster its taste. In the same clunky range, Philippa’s beer mug was such a clumsy brick she sent it (the glass, not the beer, Harviestoun Schiehallion) back. Our waiter, who actually knelt to explain every dish over the thudding music, was one of the most charming and smiley I have ever encountered.

George Tannock has a palate, as well as technique — it’s so easy to tell that when you eat somebody’s food, isn’t it? All respect to him. He has created a menu here that shows real taste at not excessive prices, while still assiduously serving the daft expectations of people who have now graduated to boutique aparthotels after watching MasterChef since they were babies, twenty-something years ago. Dreadful trade!

15/17 Leman Street, E1 (020 3621 8900, trevesandhyde.com). Mon-Fri lunch noon-2.30pm, dinner 6pm-10.30pm. Sat brunch 10.30am-3pm, dinner 6pm-10.30pm. Sun brunch 10.30am-4pm. About £120 for two.

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