The Kitchen Table at Bubbledogs - review

What is the correct etiquette for pushing past a queue of people waiting in the cold and wet for a table at a hot dogs and champagne establishment that doesn’t take bookings when you have a seat reserved in the fancy restaurant at the back? There’s nothing in Debrett’s and I didn’t have Liz Brewer’s mobile number. I sloped in behind my friend Joe, eyes cast downwards.

The queue seemed surprisingly good-natured. I’d have tripped me up. But when you’re waiting at Bubbledogs I suppose the anticipation is so heady that patience and geniality is breathed in with the scents of sauerkraut, buffalo sauce, mango chutney and kimchee. The creation of chef James Knappett and his wife Sandia Chang, Bubbledogs possibly owes something to Crif Dogs in New York. Kitchen Table, at the back behind black leather noise-muffling curtains, is a not dissimilar set-up to Brooklyn Fare in the eponymous borough.

It is beyond a chef’s table. A horseshoe bar and elevated seating surround a sleek kitchen fitted with induction hobs to keep the temperature in check. All 19 customers are in the front row. Knappett, once head chef at Marcus Wareing at The Berkeley, with a CV that also includes Per Se (where he met Chang) and Noma, states on the website that he and his team want to feel like they are cooking for people at home. Some home.

The 8pm sitting starts off quietly. We customers study each other, try to figure out relationships, make assumptions about who is or isn’t a blogger, and watch as young chefs prepare the plates. The women all wear their hair pulled back in buns and look like members of a corps de ballet, which, in a sense, they are.

Knappett, who comes across as endearingly shy, like a new teacher at a minor public school on the first day of term, elucidates the first item, giving more detail than the one word — scallop — on the 13-word list that comprises the rough paper menu. Horizontally sliced shellfish, thin as wafers, are served with pressed pineapple, fish sauce and sprigs of banana mint. Cool, refreshing, a spritely and sensibly low-key start.

The word “cod” on the menu turns out to refer to taramasalata served as a dip for pork crackling — a combo I had encountered two days previously at St John Hotel, only there the salted, soaked and dried puffed-up skin wasn’t dusted with powdered dried seaweed.

Following this was “chicken” — fried chicken skin spread with mascarpone, dotted with bacon jam. Fried skin, then more fried skin must have been a deliberate ploy but it was as hard to fathom that rationale as it was later to understand the profligate hand with butter, first on lobster with sea aster, then tagliatelle with truffle, then in the sauce for duck hearts with nettle flowers and pickled elderberries, and enriching the assembly of short ribs (aka Jacobs Ladder) and beef fillet with bone marrow.

“Do you think he has sat down and eaten this whole menu?” asked Joe in a rhetorical sort of way. Probably not, since the menu changes in part each day according to what has been bought, found or foraged. The fact is that the event (you can’t call it a meal) lacked syncopation and sufficient rigour. This will doubtless come with time.

The cheese moment was Burrata served with damson cheese, kernels extracted from the damson stones, wild oregano and olive oil. The kernel trick, which I perform when making apricot jam, is such a good one. Three desserts entitled Fig, Pear and Blackberry — all excellent, the last like a Tunnock’s teacake gone to heaven — were the culmination.

Walter Bagehot famously said about the monarchy “Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight on magic”. Watching up close foams being whooshed with a Bamix blender, blowtorches scorching and nimble fingers pushing and prodding, his wise observation came to mind as also applicable to restaurant meals. And sitting in the high chair I began to have disturbing flashbacks to being a baby, the helpless recipient of remorseless feeding. Another glass of Domaine des Schistes was called for.