Sune, London E2: ‘Elbow anyone silly enough to think this is for sharing’ – restaurant review
Sune, pronounced “sooner”, is a cool new restaurant at the bottom end of established foodie hotspot Broadway Market in east London. I adore the word “foodie”, because it makes foodies themselves shudder, but how else to describe an area so knee-deep in artisan viennoiserie, so sodden with sourdough pizza, and where you’re never more than 20m from an earnest soul pickling grusas capers? Eating out is already a tactical game round these parts, and anywhere that gets hyped is instantly oversubscribed. Calling up Max Rocha’s nearby Cafe Cecilia to enquire about the possibility of a last-minute table, for example, feels a bit like phoning the Tower of London to ask if you can pop by and try on the crowns. Risible.
And now here’s Sune, which opens just a few evenings a week, by Honey Spencer and Charlie Sims, who have been called a “hospitality power couple”, which sounds terribly intimidating, though in all fairness they are absolutely not. In fact, they’re delightful, which is one reason, on the wettest of Wednesday evenings and only a few weeks in, the place was mobbed.
Spencer and Sims, as well their chef Michael Robins, come with a pedigree from all kinds of “foodie” icons. Noma is in there, of course, because all restaurants these days must have at least one staff member who has herded ants for René Redzepi; Lyle’s is in there, too, as are the Palomar, the Barbary, the Midland Grand Dining Room and Akoko, all places I’d take a punt on for dinner any day. Spencer is a renowned sommelier – the restaurant is named after her mentor, Sune Rosforth – so expect natural wines, about a dozen types by the glass, while if you’re like me and have stopped boozing, she will tempt you over to the weird and wonderful world of experimental, low-intervention, funky, kombucha-style brews – cloudy, whiffy things that taste like distilled elderflower marsh fog with a slight hint of feet and voles’ tears, which I don’t mean in any pejorative sense. The future of non-drinking is weird, and I like it.
If Sune hasn’t annoyed you enough yet, let me explain the menu. It is a single sheet of about 10 ever-changing dishes, one of which, on the night we visited, was ready-salted crisps with egg yolk and eel. And by that I mean good, properly salty homemade crisps with decent chunks of silver-skinned fish.
Sune is one of those restaurants, a bit like Primeur or Westerns Laundry, where the menu features intriguing, delicious phrases such as “Galician sea urchin and tomato” and “fermented dairy beef tartare and croque monsieur” alongside those eely crisps, grilled pork chop with prawn sauce and a plate of potatoes. Whether you consider such a hotchpotch of sharing plates – a turbo cheese sandwich, pasta and potatoes, say – “a proper dinner” is up to you. For me, these restaurants are more a rumination on fine produce, memories, influences, restaurants worked in and countries travelled to.
We shared a homemade flatbread so hot from the oven that we needed to wait to tackle it and scoop it through a bowl of pleasingly brutal whipped horseradish topped generously with vivid orange salmon roe. Excellent. Then came that croque monsieur, which for any British comprehensive schoolchild of the 1980s was the only dining option in France. Sune’s version is a crisp, cheesy, sticky and stinky toastie with a roof rack of roughly diced, deftly seasoned raw beef. Again, wonderful. I do not normally care much for croque monsieur or for beef tartare, but here I was sharply elbowing friends who were silly enough to think it was for sharing. A bowl of strozzapreti pasta with corra linn cheese, by contrast, while satisfying, was hardly a showstopper.
Choices for dessert are brief – on the night we went, there was pear tart with sorbet or sorbet with meringue, as well as shropshire blue with caraway crackers – and the list skips quickly over actual puddings and on to a range of boozy, after-dinner treats: Talisker 10-year-old, Laphroaig quarter cask and 12-year-old Yamazaki at £30 a shot. The tart was lovely, if not earth-shattering, with thin, crisp pastry and a pear topped with an eau de vie caramel sorbet that was luxuriant and silky enough to pass for ice-cream.
There is some amazing destination cooking going on at Sune, as well as a few completely forgettable dishes, but since the menu changes constantly, it feels very much like a restaurant to which you’d return if only out of curiosity. Sune is warmly staffed, determined and still finding its feet, menu-wise in the most public of ways. Right now, you’ll get a table here much easier than at Cafe Cecilia – but only just.
Sune 129a Pritchard’s Road, London E2, 020-4568 6675. Open lunch Fri & Sat, noon-2.30pm, dinner Weds-Sat, 5.30-10.30pm. From about £45 a head, plus drinks and service
