Cloth

Cloth, in a quiet street just by the old Smithfield Market, opened in April 2024. The head chef was Tom Hurst, who formerly worked at Brawn. The building was once the home of poet John Betjeman. The dining room had several small sections, with closely packed, quite small tables. As is often the case in London the room was all hard surfaces: wooden floor, plain tables, no upholstery on the chairs. This resulted in very high noise levels at this busy lunch service. For a place called Cloth it was a pity that there were no fabrics anywhere that might have relieved the harsh acoustics. 

A plate of bread (£5) with butter from the South Downs featured sourdough made in the kitchen. The bread was very good indeed, light and airy and boldly salted without being distressingly so. This was classy bread. Pig head croquette (£7) with aioli was a simple but enjoyable snack, with a crisp batter and plenty of pork flavour. For me, the aioli was a little underpowered but that is a quibble (14/20). 

Bull’s tomato gazpacho (£14) seemed like two separate dishes fused together. The large beef tomato took up most of the plate and to be honest did not have much flavour. The limited amount of gazpacho hiding underneath it was reasonably good, and I think would have made a more successful dish on its own (13/20).

Tagliatelle with girolles, Parmesan and lemon (£22) needed more and better quality girolles but the pasta had good texture. The dish seemed a touch underseasoned (13/20). Risotto of crab and Datterini tomatoes from Sicily (£26) used carnaroli rice. The rice was arguably borderline undercooked but had absorbed the stock nicely. The crab flavour was present but somewhat subsumed by the tomatoes, the overall effect being quite rich (13/20). 

Poached yellow peach with raspberry sorbet (£10) had a sweet grenadine that was a bit overpowering but the sorbet had good texture and the peach was poached lightly (13/20). Honey parfait with lemon curd and strawberries  (10) was quite rich but had enough acidity from the lemon and the fruit to provide reasonable balance (14/20).  

Coffee was from a Company called L’Or, which is just a supposedly “luxury” brand of Jacobs Dowe Egberts, a Dutch multinational with billions of dollars in revenue and fifty separate coffee and tea brands. This was £4 for a double espresso, made from capsules rather than beans. These same capsules were at the time of writing on special offer at 25p retail, which gives you an idea of the gross margin on most restaurant coffee. It was a touch bitter but was not the very worst coffee I have drunk. There are so many good speciality coffee providers these days in London that it would be nice to see a higher standard of coffee in the capital. There is no reason to use industrial coffee like this when there are so many speciality alternatives at much the same price.

Service was friendly and the bill came to £62 per person, with nothing to drink except water. If you shared a modest bottle of wine then a typical cost per person might come to around £95 or so, which feels like quite a lot for this level of food. That is clearly a minority view as the place was packed out on this weekday lunch.