Grace and Flavour: Tramshed

Shoreditch can’t please me these days, no matter how it tries. Its swagger and spark have long since sodded off, although I do concede that the impromptu ‘market’ that emerges around Boxpark on Sunday mornings — where eccentrics sell old dog leads, Jackie annuals and half-eaten packets of Murray Mints laid out lovingly on an Asda beach towel — is still a ‘challenging experience’.

Tramshed, however, lies on Rivington Street, within staggering distance of The Bricklayer’s Arms, the prototype 1990s Shoreditch twonk drinking venue. Once upon a time, just along from Tramshed, I styled out a number of unsuitable mullet cuts and customised dungarees, and dated men called Zak, Nik and Rik who ran pointless dotcom startups worth three gazillion pounds (on paper only, obviously) from offices/squats with no working loo. Back then Shoreditch was edgy and grubby but dripping with possibility. Modern-day Rivington Street has had a boilwash and a taste of the good times, and watched all its sense of derring-do bugger off to Hackney Wick via Dalston. Try asking Addison Lee to take you to The Hackney Pearl, The Counter Café or the soon-to-be-opened Crate micro-brewery and pizzeria if you want to see a grown man snivelling into his sat nav.

So you’ll understand how I felt setting off for Mark Hix’s new venture in Shoreditch. Chicken or steak. Steak or chicken. With chips. That’s all Tramshed does. When you call up to book (they let you book! How quaint!) they play ‘Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens’, to hammer the point home. We’re paring down menus in London at the moment. No choice is ever so ‘now’. By 2014, I’m hoping all restaurants will be no-reservation, single-dish menu, serving half-raw goulash flung at us by an aloof robot. But right now, I’ll just have the chicken, served the Tramshed way: whole on a clay spike with its knobbly feet still attached. I’m not sold on this feet business. Or the spike, which makes lunch feel like part of one of those waxwork tableaux at the Jorvik Viking Centre that schoolchildren might pass on a monorail.

My chum, the artist Jamie McKelvie, ordered the 250g ‘Mighty Marbled’ sirloin steak under the accusative gaze of the honking great Damien Hirst formaldehyde-pickled bull — the only thing livening up the sterile space. For all its freshness, Tramshed at lunchtime was full of businessmen ordering 500g steaks and chuntering about tax avoidance. Friends tell me dinner is rowdier and younger, and that the Last Supper-style table on the mezzanine is fun. If you have 20 or so carnivorous friends, or work with a group of people best kept segregated from the general public, Tramshed could be the place for you.

Tramshed does offer starters. Three, to be exact. One has to order them all, at £7.50 a head — which, in the brainwashed state of ‘no choice good; choice baaad’, we readily agreed to. A large, not remotely crisp Yorkshire pudding appeared with a small bowl of unctuous mustardy something. Pleasant, but if it was in the fridge at 10pm on a Sunday there would be no post-lunch fridge raids. A sliver of smoked salmon with a radish salad came, too — if Hix is reaching to serve ‘simple food’ then he’s bang-on. The third dish of garden peas and lardons in a lemon dressing would have been delicious served warmer, but was tepid. A bottle of Les Amourettes took the edge off events.

By this point, my disquiet about the chicken’s feet was bubbling. ‘I don’t want the feet on the table,’ I mumbled, as what looked like a pterodactyl and chips arrived. McKelvie’s steak vanished quickly enough but failed to provoke much passion. Nothing was entirely hot, aside from the chips, which were gaspingly salty. I want to love Tramshed, but frankly, I think I’d be better off in Nando’s. Nando’s offers choice. It does macho peas, refillable Coke and those tiny custard tarts that are so good there’s a strong chance they’re sprinkled with crack cocaine, as I’m getting very itchy right now just writing about them. At Tramshed we shared a chocolate cheesecake. The base was soft, the filling not quite orgasmic — like being gently felt up (no sex) by Mr Cadbury’s parrot. Cheep and cheerful.

Tramshed, 32 Rivington Street, EC2 (020 7749 0478)