Review: Scully, St James

When you go all-out for flavour and innovation, you won’t hit perfection every single time. Some dishes will be a bit OTT or just plain weird. For me, that’s part of the joy. I’d rather have food I can talk about and maybe a couple of dishes I can absolutely rave about, than several courses of refined perfection that are just going to merge together with every other fine meal I’ve eaten in a forgettable soup of food.

Well, I won’t be forgetting Scully’s thousand-layer pork belly in a hurry! Or his salt-caramel egg yolk, for different reasons (reasons which may simply be that my tastebuds aren’t ready yet for broccoli with caramel sauce).

It’s a classy little joint in St James, with an open kitchen. Service was excellent, informed and clearly enthused. So they should be.

Our first plate was a snack of crispy beef tendons (think beefy prawn crackers) with a dip of pancetta kilpatrick covered in a layer of light foamy oyster mayo. This was just absolutely filthy delicious, I could have scoffed it ’til I died. Every flavour and texture: salt, sweet, spicy, earthy, umami, sour, crunchy, silky, chewy.

Next, two veggie plates. Winter tomato and coconut salad with a tomato shrub I liked a lot, Maureen less so. It was easy to add too much of the vinegary shrub and overpower things, but done right this was a fine salad. The char-grilled broccoli came with nice little blobs of dark vinegar gel, but also with dollops of “salted egg yolk”. This was actually salt-caramel egg yolk, and delicious though it was I couldn’t quite enjoy broccoli and caramel. Yet. Maybe it’s me that needs to evolve?

Back on prime form with beautifully cooked thick octopus chunks paired with a deeply funky/smoky XO pork goo and cubes of perfectly pickled daikon. This was a marvellous bit of surf and turf.

But the best was yet to come. How can I describe thousand-layer pork belly with mustard greens, tapioca and pork broth? I’m going to have to go with: PHWOOOOOOOOOOOAR! Real words escaped me. It’s also very clearly a dish that a lot of careful prep and attention goes into, so hat’s off to chef Scully. If you’re reading this, I reckon you’ve got a signature dish right here chap! We very seriously considered ordering a 2nd one instead of dessert. I wish it wasn’t only Jan 10th, because calling it “dish of the year” feels a bit daft! I’ll be lucky to eat something better in 2019.

Dessert was a bit of a let down. Black pepper ice cream and pineapple tart is a great idea, but both element were so just-barely-set that within seconds we had a plate of orange and white goo. The flavour was excellent, the texture not.

Who cares? I loved the heck out of my dinner at Scully. At £41 each before drinks, it beats the pants off a lot of £60+ tasting menus in terms of ideas, flavours and execution for my money. Wine list was good, full of interesting stuff as you’d hope. Get yourself here.