London's most controversial restaurant, where the Irish chef takes only cash and has no website
Address
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20 Caledonian Road, London, N1 9DU, England
Telephone
:
0044-2033422162
Cuisine
:
Irish
Website
:
Cost
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€€€
There's Burgundy by the glass for Bloomsday, and with it, a small Joycean crisis: could the food in Ulysses shape the menu too? A Gorgonzola sandwich seems unlikely, which leaves grilled mutton kidneys with 'a fine tang of faintly scented urine'.
The Yellow Bittern, the 18-seater, lunch-only restaurant opened by Belfast-born chef Hugh Corcoran – which quickly became the most controversial restaurant in
London
– was just the sort of place to have this on the menu.
Not long after it opened in late 2024, The Yellow Bittern triggered a storm. No card machine, no online booking, cash only. When Corcoran posted about diners treating the place like 'a public bench', a table of four nursing two mains and a single starter, some saw it as principled, others as combative. But it revealed something simpler – discomfort with a restaurant that asked for your presence.
Corcoran runs the kitchen, drawing on six years of cooking in the Basque Country and four years in Paris. He owns the restaurant with two friends – Lady Frances von Hofmannsthal (née Armstrong-Jones), who looks after the room and also publishes Luncheon magazine, and Oisín Davies, who bakes the bread.
READ MORE
Lady Frances von Hofmannsthal and Hugh Corcoran. Photograph: Peter Flude/The New York Times
Some rooms carry a feeling that goes beyond what's in them. It isn't just the colour on the walls – though here, it's the yellow of unsalted butter – or the light, which is soft and forgiving. It's something less visible. You cross the threshold and feel yourself ease.
There are white paper tablecloths with small jars of loosely arranged rosebuds, buttercups and daisies. Pictures are mismatched – a map of Ireland, black-and-white prints of Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan and Lenin – hung with casual care.
The kitchen is visible from our table, the two chefs chatting quietly as they plate at the counter, a few pots, a single stove, and shelves of glassware. There's a gentleness to the room – as if someone had made it with the hope that you might read more
Elizabeth David
.
A blackboard lists the day's dishes, written in cursive chalk beneath the date '16th June, 1904′. There's egg mayonnaise, ox tongue with green sauce, seafood chowder, hotpot, beef and parsnip pie for two, and three desserts.
The Dublin Coddle has generated a lot of buzz. Photograph: Peter Flude/The New York Times
There's no printed wine list – Corcoran pours what he loves, then talks you through it. It feels generous, not prescriptive.
But it's a hot day, so it will be water (£4) and wine by the glass (£10) – a Savoie white, a cloudy Loire chenin, and a bright young Burgundy – all poured generously.
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Baba'de restaurant review: You won't eat like this anywhere else in Ireland
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Lunch begins with half-moons of boiled egg (£9), firm yolks just giving way, on a thick spoon of yellow mayonnaise. The mayonnaise tastes like it was made minutes before, and the eggs are cold – not chilled. It makes a strong case for the underrated brilliance of boiled eggs and emulsified fat.
Waxy new potatoes – properly salted and cooked to a tender firmness – are tumbled with green peas and long stalks of watercress (£14), lightly dressed.
We relax into the room, into its friendly blur of talk – a mix of tourists and regulars – as we wait for our mains. Corcoran is in deep conversation with a table for four, opening bottles he ordered with them in mind.
The Yellow Bittern, located near London's King's Cross train station. Photograph: Peter Flude/The New York Times
The seafood chowder (£20) reveals itself as quiet comfort, cloaked in herbs and cream: chunks of white fish and scallops, with greens and soft potato, all held in a butter-light sauce. The balance, the restraint, the seasoning – it speaks of someone who cooks with quiet precision and no urge to show off.
The Lancashire hotpot (£25) appears. Slices of potato browned at the edges sit over pieces of tender lamb, carrots, peas and onions. The broth is thin but full of depth, slow-cooked with assurance.
We order dessert, then Lady Frances reappears about 15 minutes later with an apology. The soufflé has not turned out as planned, they will not be serving it. Would we like something else? At the next table a spoon cracks the brûlée, its top evenly torched. But today feels like a day for strawberries (£9), a bowl of hulled berries lounging in a pool of red wine.
For the most controversial restaurant in London, The Yellow Bittern is disarmingly lovely. There's no pretension. The pricing is honest, the wines are poured with generosity and a modest profit, and the people are kind. If this is radical – asking you to be present, to pay fairly, to take your time – then maybe we need more of it.
Lunch for two with two bottles of water and three glasses of wine was £115 (€130).
The verdict
Just go. Book the 2pm sitting and have a glorious long lunch with your pals.
Food provenance
Henderson's fish and shellfish, Swale Dale beef, vegetables from Shrub and garden, and Mike's Fancy Cheese.
Vegetarian options
Limited.
Wheelchair access
No accessible room or toilet.
Music
None.
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‘I would never, ever begrudge somebody for wanting to get out of Ireland'
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'I've tried to be very, very particular with this new record, not to revisit the concepts of the first,' he says. 'Partially because I just can't – my soul doesn't have it in it any more ... With that said, if anybody asks me to talk about Paul it's with utter joy I remember him. For Those I Love: David Balfe. Photograph: Bryan O'Brien 'I don't think it would be right to pass up an opportunity to say he was a remarkably beautiful person and incredibly sturdy friend, and he had a fascinating intelligence and hunger for knowledge ... The best art that I ever made, be it music or film, was made very closely in tandem with Paul.' If Balfe's first album was an ode to Curran and to his friends and family, Carving the Stone feels closer to a rallying call against a breakdown of the social contract in Ireland. 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Lately, however, he has opted to listen to a 30-minute summary of the book that he says was probably created by artificial intelligence. 'There is a great irony with having an AI summary of a book on technofeudalism.' Although he has tried to reject social media outright, Balfe begins each day with a scroll on Telegram, seeking out conflict reporting and 'thought pieces from people who have radically different views than me. I think it's very important for me to constantly have my viewpoint challenged if I want to be able to hold it with a sense of internal authority,' he says. 'And I'm a bit fearful of the echo chamber.' On the album track Mirror, Balfe tackles the insidiousness of ethno-staters, which is to say people who want to make the State ethnically homogenous. I ask him about the song, and the jolting chant of 'c***s' at its close. 'I feel like [ethno-staters] have been able to fool people who are suffering into thinking the way out of this is to continue to punch down further, as opposed to collectivising and working toward a common goal of improving the lives of all working people – all minority people – against the better interest of the ruling class,' he says. 'They've done an incredible job at convincing people that those who are most like them are most unlike them, that the answer to progress is further hate towards those who deserve it least and need it least, and that does nothing other than benefit a ruling class and people with a very specific ethno-state agenda.' That Ireland is an increasingly untenable place to make a life has led some towards the fringe and driven many to leave altogether. On his new track Of the Sorrows, Balfe oscillates between a sense that this place may no longer be for him and chasing something that once was. There's something haunting about the song, about the tragic dance that young people in Ireland perform, and the indecision between 'I have to leave' and 'I'll never leave'. 'The trade just hasn't been equal,' Balfe says. 'What I'm giving here, I'm not getting in return. The cost of living is so high, and what you receive in return is so low except for the love of friends and family – which has no cost; there's nothing that I would ever trade for that. 'So many of my peers have left, and I applaud every one of them who has left and found what they're looking for. I would never, ever begrudge somebody for wanting to get out of this. I understand why so many of the people that I love have looked around and said, 'How can I justify staying when I give so much just to live in a box room?'' Balfe is generous with his time as we walk – his only concern is to be able to buy a Shelbourne FC ticket at 7pm. (He's an enthusiastic Shels fan, and our chats drift in and out of soccer.) The musician is not religious, but the local church took up a mythological space in Balfe's mind when he was growing up. As a rite of passage, teenagers would climb its steep roof and stand atop the cross. 'When people go into Donaghmede they go, 'Yous have a f**kin mad church, don't you?'' he says as we approach the distinctive building, the four sides of which have sharply angled roofs that lean against one another. 'It's very hard for me, and some of my friends, to talk about [Donaghmede] without referencing the church.' For Those I Love: David Balfe at the Church of the Holy Trinity in Donaghmede. Photograph: Bryan O'Brien Balfe never climbed it. Soon before it would have been the singer's turn, one unfortunate boy fell and broke both legs. (According to local lore, he managed to cycle all the way home afterwards.) 'With that, people were, like, 'No más.' So, in my head, that person – who will go unnamed – is the last true Donaghmeder. I haven't heard of anybody doing it since.' He's quick to add that it's not something he'd advise anybody to try, either. 'Like I was saying about people writing messages on walls, there's a cultural narrative to places that make them what they are,' he says. 'The idea of building importance into things that traditional culture or the State or your parents would tell you is silly, or without value, is something that comes up a lot across this record.' 'Carving the stone' – chipping away at a project to reveal a finished core – is a phrase Balfe has found himself using when asked about his music. 'You start with this mess – a big wall of sound, a large stone – and you're slowly chipping away and revealing the image or the narrative that you want to tell at the end. 'I think it's also very reflective of the process of making the record, which took years. It was a really, really long process, a very laborious, intense and extremely exhausting process – probably a lot more so than the first record,' he says. 'Maybe you're losing parts of yourself in the process, but ultimately you're doing it in order to try and find that thing at the core, like a new sense of beauty, a new sense of self and, ultimately, a new sense of emotional security.' In the spring of 2023 Balfe spent a month secluded in a house in Co Leitrim, with little more than wild goats for occasional company. 'I wrote from morning until night every single day,' he says. 'I'd stand outside sometimes and shadowbox and do some push-ups. Otherwise I was back inside writing – and I just wrote garbage. Absolute garbage. I was forcing something I wasn't ready to write. And I think I needed to remember that all the best writing I've done has been at home.' He finds it cliched to recount now: on his final day in Leitrim, after he'd packed up most of his gear, he felt a draw to try one last time. He'd soon written the chords for the final track on the album, I Came Back to See the Stone Had Moved, by far its most distinctive and uplifting song. The name gets at a sort of resurrection Balfe felt when he returned to Dublin. Still, there's a deeper layer of meaning stemming from 'something a little bit darker and more valuable, something I'm a little bit more uncomfortable to speak about but coming back to a desire to be here'. Its piano chords, uncertain, gradually build into something cohesive and propelling. Balfe revisits harrowing themes from earlier on the album and drips in pieces of hope – hope about building a 'better cultural and social future for working people in Ireland', he says. It 'ultimately arrives at a very life-affirming point, a very brazen statement on the desire to be alive and to be here. And I think the writing was reflective of the place that I was arriving to in my own self through years of work, great therapy and incredible love from the people around me.' I try to dig a little deeper, but Balfe is hesitant. 'I'd probably hold on to an element of privacy around some of the lyrics on the record,' he says. 'Despite the fact that this record is a record that I'm sharing publicly – with the knowledge that I'm sharing it publicly, unlike the first one – there are still parts of it that are written very directly for just my friends ... I'd never want to get to a place with this project where it turns its back on what it originally was.' Listen closely and at certain points on the album you can hear Balfe talking in the background, buried odes to the people he cares about, to make them part of Carving the Stone's DNA. At the close of the final song there's a thunderous bagpipe interpretation of Amazing Grace. Here, transformed, the hymn becomes a euphoric counterpoint to the dark insularity of other parts of the album. Balfe's final lyric, 'I'm choosing to live,' bookends a project he's not sure has a future but can only reflect an artist secure in himself, in a city that gets stranger by the day. Carving the Stone is released by September
Irish Times
3 hours ago
- Irish Times
Zealous book bans and brilliant writers forged strong Irish Penguin links from the start
'When my first novel appeared in Penguin,' said the writer Malcolm Bradbury, 'I regarded it as a step towards canonisation'. He was surely not alone. For most of us, Penguin books have always been there, from the classroom to the bedside table. But as the publisher celebrates its 90th anniversary this month, it's easy to forget that before its arrival, it was almost impossible to read a good paperback. Paperback novels existed, of course, but they were mostly pulp fiction, penny dreadfuls, as disposable as they were garish. 'Real books' – literature – were largely preserved in hardback, the durability of the format matching the contents. Then in 1934, the publisher Allen Lane was returning from a visit to see his author Agatha Christie. At Exeter train station, he wanted something to read on the journey home but couldn't find anything that was both affordable and worthwhile. [ Books better than screens for students, study finds Opens in new window ] The idea hit him in a coup de foudre. Quality literature in paperback – a good book for the price of a packet of cigarettes. Lane's secretary came up with the name Penguin: a 'dignified but flippant' symbol. A conservative publishing industry was sceptical that the idea would work. But – allowing for the benefit of hindsight – of course it was going to work. This was a culture before TV, before hand-held devices, when the people's choice for portable entertainment was a book. Many people had one on the go at all times, borrowed from lending libraries in Woolworths: so paperback books were a way for publishers to get – literally – into every pocket. The first set of 12 Penguin books appeared in July 1935, including novels by Ernest Hemingway , Dorothy L Sayers and (the indirect inspiration for the series, so it was only fair) Agatha Christie. The series was indeed a huge hit, shifting three million copies in the first year. From the start, Penguin drew on Irish writers for its list. The 17th Penguin title, published in October 1935, was Liam O'Flaherty's Civil War drama The Informer, though not all its Irish titles were so durable. (Does anyone now read St John Ervine's The Wayward Man, published by Penguin in 1936?) [ What do Irish writers read? Donal Ryan, Mark Tighe, Nuala O'Connor, Claire Hennessy and more give recommendations Opens in new window ] Soon, Penguin was not just republishing older books but taking on original titles. The publisher showed that books could be mass-market material without aiming for the lowest common denominator. It created a democratisation of reading. Liam O'Flaherty: Penguin published his novel The Informer in 1935 They showed too that books could be timely as well as timeless, with the rapid turnaround of the Penguin Specials series. In 1937, the title Germany Puts the Clock Back sold 50,000 copies in four days, to a public hungry for detailed information on the Nazi threat. But it also showed that they could not just follow trends, but lead them and initiate the public conversation. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), about the dangers of pesticides and the industry's cover-up, was a clarion call for the environmental movement. [ From the archive: Fifty years on, Silent Spring still matters, by Eamon Ryan Opens in new window ] Most famously, Penguin became part of a campaign itself with the publication of DH Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover. Penguin published the book in 1960 to test the new Obscene Publications Act , which allowed so-called obscene work to be published if it had 'literary merit'. The publisher invited prosecution and the authorities were happy to oblige. At the trial numerous authors and academics spoke up for the book (though Enid Blyton turned down the opportunity to do so), and the prosecution bombed. Penguin's marketing genius – an important part of its success – came into play: it had 200,000 copies of Lady Chatterley's Lover ready to distribute (using a different printer, as the usual one refused to handle the book) and managed to get some copies on sale the same day as the acquittal. One month later, the novel had sold two million copies. Ireland's own zealous book bans could also create a market that Penguin was keen to satisfy. In 1950 it published a translation of Apuleius's second-century raunchy Latin satire The Golden Ass, which had been banned in this country. And Ireland's once unloved son, James Joyce, has a strong history with Penguin. Allen Lane, who had been the first publisher to produce a UK edition of Ulysses in 1936 (when Penguin was still a sideline for him), reissued the novel as Penguin title number 3,000 in 1969. James Joyce: Penguin reissued Ulysses in 1969. Photograph: Lipnitzki/He had paid £75,000 for the paperback rights, a record at the time. Within 18 months, it had sold almost half a million copies – an extraordinary figure for a novel as dense, allusive, ambitious and delightful as Joyce's masterpiece. More widely, Penguin has a good track record of recognising Ireland as a country that punches well above its weight in literary brilliance. In 1946, to celebrate George Bernard Shaw's 90th birthday, it published one million books in one day: 100,000 copies each of 10 of his titles. They sold out in six weeks. Shaw had been a Penguin stalwart since the early days. Its imprint of non-fiction work, Pelican Books, was launched with Shaw's two-volume The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism; the author modestly claimed that these new cheap editions 'would be the saviour of mankind'. Now Penguin continues to publish many of Ireland's most successful writers, from Marian Keyes and Colm Tóibín to Donal Ryan and Ross O'Carroll-Kelly, and has its own imprint for Irish writing, Sandycove. Marian Keyes. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw But what first comes to mind when many of us think of Penguin books are the classics series: the slightly forbidding black classics, or the edgier, cooler modern classics. The Penguin Classics series was launched in 1946: its launch title, a new translation of The Odyssey, set out its stall clearly. This was a range to be both high-minded and accessible, to bring the greatest writers in history within reach of the ordinary book buyer. The Modern Classics followed in 1961, for books that weren't quite old enough to be classics, but demanded some recognition – or at least some marketing. They were given stylish covers, in line with its aim to be – as former series editor Simon Winder put it – 'a series to be enjoyed, rather than something that is good for you'. But the Classics and Modern Classics ranges have a tricky line to tread: these books not only reflect the literary canon, but they also help to shape it. It took a long time for Penguin to break out of the traditional modern classics mode of white men: Orwell, Waugh, Greene, Fitzgerald. The current publishing director of Penguin Classics, Jessica Harrison, acknowledges this. When reviewing the list for the 90th anniversary celebrations, she told me, she could see that 'in the 80s they brought in a lot more women writers' and later 'there must have been an editor who was really interested in Japan and Chinese [literature].' Now, the list looks wider, though even now there are only a handful of Penguin Modern Classics writers from China, and one from North Africa. But Penguin's success is not just down to the quality of the books. From the start – see the Penguincubator, a Penguin books vending machine launched in 1937 – the publisher has been a ruthless exploiter of its own intellectual property, with special editions and rejacketed reissues a regular feature of its catalogue. (It currently keeps no fewer than seven editions of Orwell's Animal Farm in print.) This approach itself leads to unexpected successes. In 2018, it launched a dirt-cheap (80p in the UK) series of Little Black Classics, including Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' most famous work – which meant you could buy The Communist Manifesto at the till point in Tesco. As a result, it made the Sunday Times bestseller list. More recently, Fyodor Dosotevsky has been having a moment, thanks to handsome reissues of his novella White Nights, which became Penguin's bestselling classic title of 2024, outstripping hardy perennials like Jane Austen. This ruthless reuse of its titles has its latest manifestation in the Penguin Archive series, a set of 90 short books published this year to celebrate the anniversary, with handsome covers reflecting the various styles of Penguin books over the decades. Dracula author Bram Stoker The bestselling title of the series when it was launched? Not Austen or Orwell or Fitzgerald, but an Irishman: Bram Stoker, whose short story collection The Burial of the Rats outsold the other 89 titles. It's impossible, of course, to cover the full range of Penguin's history even in a generous spread of 90 titles. But nonetheless, there do seem to be one or two curious omissions. Are there, I asked Jessica Harrison, any authors she regrets not including in the Archive? 'It did feel odd,' she said after a long pause, 'to be without [James] Joyce.' Not half.
