Restaurant of the week: Shrimpy's

This King's Cross ex-filling station will be the fashion crowd's favourite fillet

Monster munch: the soft-shell crab burger (pic: Danny Elwes)

5 December 2014

King's Cross is full of wonders these days: glorious St Pancras, great big holes where the gasworks ruled, new tree-lined streets, the Alice in Wonderland finances of the Guardian newspaper in the swank palace of Kings Place...

The Filling Station, though, takes the biscuit. Where a singularly grubby petrol station used to be there’s a ghostly new structure of scalloped, translucent fibreglass abstractly copying the lines of an American gas stop that might have featured in a moody Hollywood noir or a painting by Edward Hopper. From the road, you can’t tell what, if anything, it contains.

It’s the latest work from the youngish architects Carmody Groarke, whose credits include designing the 7/7 Memorial, the Frieze Art Fair, the current Bauhaus show at the Barbican and the pop-up restaurant Studio East Dining, commissioned by Pablo Flack and David Waddington of Bistrotheque.

Flack and Waddington were fashion designers before becoming entrepreneurial restaurateurs in changing bits of the East End, with the 333 Club, the Shoreditch Electricity Showrooms, and the Bricklayers Arms, as well as Bistrotheque itself and other pop-ups including Reindeer in Brick Lane and Flash at the Royal Academy. The Filling Station, this time intended to last at least a couple of years until the site is redeveloped, is their grandest intervention yet.

People wandering in to investigate it soon start to smile. On Saturday evening, in that lovely light and heat, as the sun set, with the yellow flag irises in the canal glowing, a coot busying about, partying canal boats passing, it seemed an enchanted corner. Can that ever before have been said of Goods Way?

From next month, some of the space will be used for various cultural events, as well as hosting a showroom for the student housing developer Urbanest. Meanwhile, Shrimpy’s, a 50-seat restaurant in the building that used to be the garage shop, has been open since last Thursday, though you wouldn’t know it driving by.

Although the food has been themed to be what you might, in your dreams, find at “a dusty roadside cafe on a West Coast road trip”, the lavish table setting — all white linen, crystal glass and shiny silver plate — deliberately, you might even say ironically, distances you from any humdrum garage associations.

In fact, the place is cute as can be, boasting a taupe-coloured bar decorated with pineapple lamps and perversely contrasting flowers, with stools to perch and pose on. On the end walls, an illustrator has been at work, daintily sketching in glancing references to suitable cultural icons: Cyd Charisse, Coco Chanel, Popeye, Liz Taylor...

The food is a fry-up, a stylised fry-up, incorporating lots of buzzy Peruvian and Mexican ingredients (chipotle, chimichurri, humita, chicharron —massive teeth-snapping pork scratchings), but a fry-up nonetheless: diner food in excelsis.

Salt cod croquettes with aioli (£8) came fiercely browned and had only a mild taste of the fish but they were soon scarfed up. Roasted calamari (£8.50) with sprinkled black olive tapenade standing in for black pudding, were tender little rings, served on cress and fennel shavings. Other starters include tuna tostada, ceviche with plantains and a sweetcorn chowder.

From the mains, fried chicken, sweetcorn and red pepper polenta (£16) hit the spot too — excellent chicken served with an intensely sweetcorny mush, not really polenta as we know it, decorated with soft dice of the pepper, a cunning evocation of downhome Southern food, without the grossness.

Soft-shell crab burger (£16) is a monster signature dish — a whole slightly crunchy crab with its legs sticking out over the bun, Alien-style, on avocado and lettuce, with a slathering of mayonnaise. Impossible to eat tidily in the hand, yet not meant for knife and fork either, it’s the fishwich to beat them all.

We rolled on to puddings. A poached half quince with crème fraîche and caramelised nuts (£6) had, for once, not been overspiced or oversweetened, a nice foil to a glass of Sauternes, one of the few French wines on the mainly Spanish and American list. A chocolate sundae (£7) was not too big, aiming to be a concentration of yumminess, stuffed with brownies, further crunch coming not just from a layer of pistachios but, for a final Yankee fling, peanuts too. It’s food to make you grin, a rendition on the plate of the Filling Station’s architecture: idealised, slightly surreal, knowingly out of place here.

Shrimpy’s is already rammed with desperate early-adopters. Fashiontossers, I think they’re called? I have never been in a place where people eyed each other up so much, almost insanely anxious to check out who else had got in. Who could they have all been? You got me.

On opening night, I am reliably told, they included the designer Pam Hogg and the singer Paloma Faith. On Saturday, they included a guy in a shorty romper suit and a 6ft 7in lady with a microskirt, a blonde crop and ever so muscular arms. Such an addition to the gaiety of nations. Shrimpy’s couldn’t be more committed to that. A lovely place where there was nothing good before.

The King’s Cross Filling Station, Goods Way, N1 (020 8880 6111, shrimpys.co.uk). Open daily 11am-10.30pm (11pm Fri and Sat). Around £100/£120 for two.

FIVE THINGS DAVID ATE THIS WEEK

1 I made linguine al granchio, the nicest way of stretching crab — but daftly followed the River Café recipe to the letter, whereas I usually substitute zest for lemon juice and spring onions for the garlic, to make it milder and, to my taste, tastier.

2 For Saturday lunch, we ate the first meal at the house we exchanged on the day before. Great takeaway kebabs and salad from the fantastic Turkish restaurant Gokyuzu in Green Lanes (gokyuzurestaurant.co.uk), in the garden with a bottle of fruitgum rosé. This place is surely the best value in all London.

3 On Sunday night, after a long day of going back and forth to the tip, shell-on brown shrimps from Islington Farmer’s Market. They’ve become a ritual, 7pm, every Sunday, with a glass of Mâcon, that mainstay of life: bliss.

4 On Monday lunchtime I resorted to the works canteen. Mistake. As with everything else, there is an art to cooking potatoes and it starts with cooking them enough. This they have not mastered. Better to starve.

5. The Green Lanes greengrocers are extraordinary too. They’ve got not just cherries now but the first apricots. Nothing cooked beats new fruit. The nectarine and curious peach into my hands themselves do reach, you bet.

Restaurant of the week: Shrimpy's

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