Grace Dent reviews Duck and Waffle

Off to Duck & Waffle, Heron Tower: turn right out of Liverpool Street Station, walk two minutes. It’s close to that ubiquitous post-work boozer Dirty Dicks, whose name has caused my friends and me much ribald glee for decades. ‘If anyone calls,’ the trick is to announce deadpan, ‘I’ll be getting a stiff one in Dirty Dicks.’ The only thing more Carry On than Dicks is announcing that you’re being ‘taken up the Oxo Tower’, which I can’t even type without cackling like a cormorant.

And to be fair, Bishopsgate needed jokes to jolly it along, as, until recently, it was little more than a fume-choked, drab traffic jam where New Zealand backpacking free-zines were dispensed and beetroot-faced City boys threw kebab salad at you while fleeing for their last train to Billericay. So I watched as the Heron Tower was hammered up to skyscraping levels with a sense of malaise, as nothing much ‘for the force of good’ tends to come from these architectural ego-rubs. For God’s sake, just look at the Shard, that hulking great septic haemorrhoid on London’s horizon, supplying neither a pretty view nor a decent bloody bar. I can be pacified about most terrible things if you describe me the bar. And I mean a proper bar that serves late, with serious but silent bartenders who will knock me up a Dark and Stormy promptly in a good glass without mentioning the words ‘artisanal cocktails’ (served in a teapot as I sit on a Space Hopper, which they need back in 45 minutes).

To its credit, Duck & Waffle opens 24 hours a day, though who eats there at 4am I don’t know. Jet-lagged City bosses? Nocturnal foodies? People cooling down after a murder? It also has a great wine list, odd, extravagant comfort food and the most charming view of London I’ve ever seen — more beautiful than a walk over Westminster Bridge at midnight, or a whizz round the London Eye. Jump in the lift to Duck & Waffle at dusk and it whizzes you upwards at a disconcerting speed to the 40th floor (actually so fast it made me nauseous), then flips you into a bar where all the walls are glass and the floors are shiny and the bar is inside out, just a huge kitchen workstation with barmen buzzing around it.

In fact, if Duck & Waffle were a woman, it would be like what Richard Burton said about Liz Taylor: ‘She was a bit bloody much.’ A more evil Grace Dent might say that Duck & Waffle is a good place to take a frenemy with vertigo just to watch them quietly implode and begin bashing against the glass like a demented bluebottle shouting, ‘MUST JUMP!’

Foodwise... well, to my mind, duck doesn’t go with waffles (it’s a signature dish) in the same way that hot dogs don’t complement champagne (coming soon at Bubbledogs on Charlotte Street), and the most yummy way to serve chicken isn’t ‘still with knobbly claws attached’ (I’m looking at you, Tramshed), but this is London and we are open-minded folk.

The concept at Duck & Waffle is that everything, small plates and large, is for sharing and you can eat with your fingers. This would suggest that the menu is designed so that things complement each other, which they don’t. We ordered cod tongues with tartare (mmm, chewy), a tomato salad (it was what it was), a lobster slider and a lamb slider, utterly delicious but don’t tell me sliders are for sharing — sliders are a 1990s party snack with delusions of hipster grandeur. We ate octopus with chorizo (slightly tough, not wonderful) and a piece of wishy-washy burrata. The honeycomb, brownie and marshmallow fluff pudding was a bowl of children’s party-bag contents that together are far too sweet to eat.

Yet none of this simply ‘OK-ness’ would stop me going back. There’s a lovely, buzzy, let-your-hair-down atmosphere about Duck & Waffle, and the fact that it stays open late for Londoners like me and you who don’t wish to be sent to bed by the council at 11pm has made it a new addition to my little black book. It’s time to take someone up the Heron Tower.