Skof
is the third restaurant recently where we’ve been given a playlist to take away along with the menu. I didn’t realise a chef’s musical tastes were also more refined than the average punter? The funny thing is, they’re never edgy or full of interesting acts I’ve never heard of, just a string of classics and most over 20 years old. Luckily the food at Skof is anything but safe and predictable!
Skof has a clean, uncluttered, cosy-industrial vibe. Service is great and the whole team seem deeply knowledgable about all the food and drinks. There’s a nicely egalitarean thing they do here too. They could easily offer up the four kitchen counter seats as a premium option for more dosh, but instead each table in the restaurant takes a turn to come up and sit at the counter to watch the open kitchen at work and eat one of their dishes there, served by chef Tom Barnes. We had a beautiful dish of scallop pieces in oyster broth, dusted with a snowy granita of seaweed and lemon thyme and flecked with nuggests of deep-fried oyster. The zippy granita and the oyster perfectly evoked a day out at the seashore.
Beef tartare
The rest of the sixteen course menu was back at our table, and it was all exceptionally strong with a few real stand-out dishes. The best snack was glazed lobster perched atop a finger of sourdough bread that had been fried and soaked in lobster-y goodness, the whole draped with a sliver of full-flavoured pork fat. Monstrously good. Among the starters, aside from the scallop, there was a chawanmushi custard topped with absolutely devilish crispy fried hen of the woods mushroom, so umami as to be almost like crispy bacon, with an extra hum of truffle from the dashi. If they’d lined up five more bowls of this I’d have been done for the evening! But then I’d have missed out on the confit chicken in mushroom sauce and wild garlic oil, topped with chips of char-grilled artichoke that were absolutely magical flavour-bombs. Perhaps one slightly weak dish: potatoes in a smoky onion broth with cuttlefish ribbons, but the little balls of potato didn’t really work together with the slippery ribbons of cuttlefish.
Definitely one of the strongest starter sections we’ve had in a long time. The fish course of cod was good, a rich buttermilk sauce concealing bits of smoked eel and a base of sticky, sweet, fragrant Roscoff onions. The duck was a beautiful piece with a very nice bit of herby-offaly sausage on the side. Not sure about the tapioca in the gravy, but it was different. Didn’t find the promised note of fig leaf but it can be a hard flavour to capture and not overwhelm.
Duck
Good dessert game, I particularly liked the dish of compressed strawberries with a jasmine-flavoured cream and an almond-y crunch in the middle; great tangle of textures and flavours, the jasmine a really good compliment for the excellent strawbs. Also towards the end, a little cone of milk ice cream with a lavish mix of powerful flavours beneath: rum, raisin, burnt butter and black truffle. And finally my favourite, a little piece of a beautiful tiramisu, almost certainly the best I’ve ever tasted, a tribute to chef Tom’s father.
The menu was £165 per person and felt right up to the mark for me. The starter section was certainly the strongest. We went with wine pairings and the selection was wide-ranging and interesting, no reliance on the obvious names and regions, generally excellent. I think Skof is confidently superb for what is still a very young restaurant, and I’m imagining it will only get better still.
Lobster
