Brat (Shoreditch), London - 9.5/10

Recently awarded 1 Michelin star, this restaurant inspired to the Basque cuisine, does an amazing job is merging its rustic style with an amazing quality of ingredients and attention to cooking techniques

Turbot

Overall evaluation: 9.5/10

Food quality/ taste: 9.5/10

Price: 9/10 (~£100 pp for 4 starters to share, one fish main, one dessert with a bottle of wine)

Service: 8.5/10

Value for money: 9.5/10

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Brat, which in Basque means 'Turbot', is a pretty new restaurant just on top of the Smoking Goat in Shoreditch, but it has already gained a huge popularity and one Michelin star this year. I believe this success is well deserved, given the amazing taste of most of the dishes and quality of ingredients.

Me and Francesco went to Brat in order to pre-celebrate Christmas, given we will spend it apart, each of us with the respective families, so we did not pay much attention to the budget and decided to treat ourselves well!

The environment of the restaurant is pretty rustic and informal, but at the same time cozy and cool, also given the fact that you can see the kitchen and the big wood oven, key to cook to perfection some of the breads they serve.

Bread with anchovies

Most of the starters and snacks are meant to be shared and I could say also the mains, given they are usually pretty big to be eaten by one person. With Francesco we decided to go for a few starters to share and then for a charcoal grilled turbot, still to share.

Almost all of the starters were pretty amazing, a few highlights for me were:

- A sort of focaccia bread cooked in the wood fire oven, topped with anchovies, which was delicious

- The same kind of bread topped with mushroom and winter truffle, which was also very good, but I was expecting the truffle to be a bit stronger in flavor (I understand that for 11£ you cannot ask for an Alba Truffle however!)

- A crab salab with smoky fennels and cabbage, which I really liked, in particular the smokiness of vegetable in contrast with the milder and creamy crab.

The starters were almost enough for me (not for Francesco though :)), however we still had the turbot, which is one of the signature dishes of Brat, so could not skip that!

Crab salad

You can order different sizes of the fish for different prices (between 65£ and 85£) and we went for the small one, just because the medium and large were not available anymore.

I really liked the fish, cooked to perfection, yet very simple: you could taste the true flavor of the fish and its juices.

Finally, Francesco with his sweet tooth was tempted by one of Brat signature desserts, the burnt cheesecake. This is a cheesecake, which is cooked in the wood fire oven, to create a sort of burnt crust on top; Francesco was really impressed about it.

We accompanied this amazing dinner with a very good Italian white wine (a Verdicchio), which was suggested by the waiter as a good match with the starters we ordered and the turbot.

Dinner was not cheap I have to say, but I believe the price (~£100 pp) was aligned with what we ordered. Also, if you go for a 'more normal' dinner with no bottle of wine, but just a glass I believe you can stay in the £60 pp range.

All in all I really recommend Brat and think I will come back to try the other tasty dishes I missed this time. Make sure you book in advance (1 month) as the place is pretty popular!