Review: Counter 71, Shoreditch

Wow there are a lot of fine dining options out east these days. Shoreditch and Hackney are now huge hotspots for splash-out meals, perhaps shaped by cheaper rents while still being pretty accessible on the tube and train network? The latest we tried was Counter 71, where as the name suggests, all the covers are counter-seated around the open kitchen. Everyone is seated and served at the same time. Worth noting a really lovely bar downstairs, called Lowcountry, where we began with a pair of excellent cocktails.

Back upstairs, we got stuck in. They’ve taken a 100% British take on produce, right down to the detail like herbs and spices, nothing (except wine!) passed our lips that wasn’t grown in the country. Impressive dedication to a theme, but did the food stand up?

We enjoyed a nice set of snacks to start, the highlight being a tiny donut stuffed with beef tartare and topped with a little hit of chilli and vivid green wild garlic butter. The smoked eel between black barley wafers was visually lovely but hit one of those odd uncanny valley notes when the wafers turned out to be softly chewy instead of crisp.

First starter was a single tempura shiitake, topped with a lovely seaweed emulsion. It wasn’t the best hit of tempura I’ve had recently, being a little on the oily side and the mushroom inside too juicy. Things got a lot better with a wonderful cobnut “tofu”, silky soft and tasting so amiably of fresh cobnuts, topped with powerfully flavoured maitake mushroom. After that perhaps my favourite dish: ribbons of lightly cooked cuttlefish in a bowl of beautifully dark tuna and seaweed stock, pepped up with brightly warm spiced I couldn’t quite identify.

The main fish course was a little cake made of lobster claw meat, delicately charred on top, in a beautiful saffron broth and served with a fresh and fragrant tomato gel. This was altogether an adorable, if small, bite. The lamb for the main was a lovely piece of meat, packed with flavour and well charred on the outside, juicy pink within. Some pressed slow-cooked belly alongside added a contrasting flavour. Just the one spear of asparagus to accompany.

Dessert was a teeny-tiny hogweed tartlet with four pieces of a strawberry carefully balanced on top, a scoop of cherry ice cream on top of those. It was a dear little thing and the hay-ish hogweed flavour came through the very lovely strawberries well. Pre-dessert was a very bright and perfect sea buckthorn granita and good blackberry ice cream.

There was some excellent food here, and we had a lovely evening, but looking back the tale of the night seems to be modesty: the kind of portion sizes I’d expect on a tasting menu with twice the number of courses. This was born out by how I felt on the way home: not hungry per se, but not full. I like to leave a three-digit meal feeling at least full. If not positively stuffed. Och, I know that’s not the point, but at £145 the menu is priced pretty high and while the food was really good, I’d only pick a couple out as memorable. I’d have to say that Counter 71 wouldn’t be my first pick as the East London tasting menu you should be looking out for.