The Shaston Arms, London W1: ‘Just because you can do things doesn’t mean you should do them’ – restaurant review | Grace Dent on restaurants
A pub that wants to be a old-school boozer and a cool restaurant both at the same timeWhile perched inside what felt like a repurposed bookshelf at the draughty back end of the Shaston Arms, sitting next to the dumb waiter and waiting for the ping to herald the arrival of my £16 plate of red mullet with squid ink rice, I had time to consider yet again the so-called “pub revival” in cool modern hospitality.Old boozers are reclaimed, reloved and restored, and the great tradition of going down the pub is celebrated.The Devonshire in nearby Piccadilly is, of course, the daddy, the Darth Vader of this trend, winning plaudits, TikTok adoration and celebrity fans aplenty.So it’s no wonder that myriad other hospitality operators have cast an eye over their local neglected fleapit and thought: “Let’s buy some Mr Sheen, give that old hovel a polish and start serving duck à l’orange and flourless chocolate tart.It’s all the rage! Gen Z loves it!”Whether Gen Z really does love anything about the pub experience as it was in the 20th century is debatable, however, because inside these poshed-up spit-and-sawdust boozers, all the phlegm and fag ash has gone – as have the dartboards, pool tables, punch-ups, topless women on KP peanut pub cards and the ever-present bar-fly alcoholic drinking himself yellow while droning on about his marital problems.
“It’s a pub just like pubs used to be,” proclaim many of these places, of which the Shaston near Carnaby Street is a great example,But those old pubs had jukeboxes blaring problematic ballads by Tom Jones, and a snug bar with a shag tartan carpet where the womenfolk could nestle with their glass of Dubonnet because we weren’t quite welcome in the saloon bar, and especially not if we asked for a pint,The Shaston is a pleasantly sterile, heavily Gen Z-friendly experience: a polished room with some strategically placed rock’n’roll art, a few beers with weird names on tap and, of course, a menu offering fennel and escarole caponata with hazelnuts and caramel flan with miyagawa,The menu is imaginative and, in its bowls of beef-fat onion rings with smoked cod’s roe, merguez baguettes and mashed potato topped with scallop, makes the odd wry nod towards old-school pub comfort food,But there are also flights of finesse with the likes of delica squash with fontina and walnut salsa rosso, and some very salty bigoli with chanterelles and pecorino.
Some of the cooking is very delicate, too – that creamy mash with a lightly spiced scallop and curry leaves, for example – but elsewhere it is simply heavy-handed,Do whopping great and not particularly crunchy onion rings really need heavily smoked fish roe as an accompaniment? In fairness, the plate was whisked away before I’d finished them, so they saved me the trouble of solving that particular conundrum,And does a caramel tart need an overdose of salted almonds and some very bitter citrus fruit? Just because you can do these things doesn’t mean you should do them,The biggest issue with the cooking here, though, is that the Shaston Arms is very keen to be an old-school boozer at the same time as being a cool restaurant that serves food at premium prices,Service-wise, however, in the restaurant at least, there was little or no hospitality at all, because they’ve seemingly not employed a single member of staff who is able to provide any of the standard niceties of a restaurant’s front of house, such as checking if a customer wants another drink, changing cutlery or side plates between courses, asking if everything is OK, making eye contact, explaining what the dishes are or even noticing when a passing bartender says loudly, “God, it’s cold in the restaurant bit, isn’t it?” Meanwhile, the diners – ie, me – sit with chattering teeth next to a ringing reservations telephone and someone cutting bread, which incidentally is £4.
50 a pop for a minuscule amount of baguette with nondescript, fridge-cold butter,And all this cost £144 – of which, laughably, £16 was added on for service – that I could have better spent on several visits to Wagamama,The reason the Devonshire is so celebrated for doing an apparently “easy” thing is because the dance between spit-and-sawdust and “We’re actually recreating the Sportsman at Seasalter” is a precarious one that requires a thousand tricky pirouettes, as well as plenty of well-trained staff and a dining room away from the actual pub rabble,It takes a lot of effort and expense to look that thrown together,Without it, you’re just charging £4.
50 for unsalted chips in an unheated lean-to and not checking if anyone wants salt, sauce or vinegar, or even noticing when your customers get up to leave.They sell crisps at Wetherspoons, so I think I’ll try there.The Shaston Arms 4-6 Ganton Street, London W1, 020-3757 5774.Open lunch Tues-Sat, noon-2.30pm, Sun noon-4.
30pm; dinner Mon-Sat, 5.30-9.30 pm.From £35-£40 a head for three courses, plus drinks & service
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