I like to believe that if I wasn’t married-with-smalls but instead simply dating Him and working 9-5, we would live on Rivington Street, Shoreditch. We’d have a desperately cool little studio flat, a short commute to our start-up jobs and spend Saturday afternoons drinking cocktails at LoungeLover and checking out new stock at Start London.
But seeing as none of the above is reality, He and I needed to journey to Shoreditch on Saturday night to meet friends at Mark Hix’s seventh and newest restaurant venture, Tramshed. Choosing our dinner guests had been solely based around a love of meat as, if you haven’t yet heard, this joint (excuse the pun) is simple in its offering: chicken and steak. No silly sauces, no foreign-sounding spices and certainly no patronising vegetarian option. We were there for business, serious meat-eating business.
Hix’s Tramshed with Hirst’s centre piece
And already I feel like I’m making Tramshed sound like a characterless concept restaurant. And it truly isn’t. As you enter this Grade II-listed warehouse-like building, you are struck by its stunning cool and rather handsome interior. Designed by British architect Vincent Harris and built in 1905 to generate electricity for trams, it immediately feels like a real destination. And then you notice (you actually can’t miss) the amazing piece of Brit Art by Hix’s chum, Damian Hirst. Entitled ‘Cock and Bull’, it is a vitrine of a cow with a chicken on its back and is showcased in the centre of the restaurant.
I am a big fan of little choice. Pouring over a menu, I find, just causes confusion and it’s always more fun to get on with catching up over a glass of something. There are three starters and at £8 per head, you get the lot. Oversized Yorkshire puddings with whipped chicken livers, smoked salmon with fennel and an odd-looking Armenian salad. A little spoilt by my mother’s moist versions perfected over the years for my Northern father, I found these Yorkshire puds to be a little dry. But our waitress revealed that they were cooked in batches of 60, so that explains that. Everything else was delicious but I was simply impatient for the main event.
roast Woolley Park Farm free-range chicken, claws intact
Our team decision to order both the Roast Woolley Park Farm free-range chicken (£25 2-3 to share) and a 500g Glenarm sirloin steak (£40) was a great one. We feasted. The chips were cooked in chicken fat. How good do you reckon they tasted? All of the meat was extraordinarily good.
Desert was totally unnecessary. However, we ordered the chocolate fondue, with cherries and marshmallows (£5.75). I think we might have felt more deserving of it had we been either cold or hungry. But I do have to admit it was pretty delicious too.
As we walked back to the car, girlfriend and I were accosted by a 20-something in a toga. Would we like to come to a toga party on the next corner? Dating, childless me would have been there in a shot. Real me motored home, full and happy.
Tramshed 32 Rivington Street EC2 020 7749 0478
(meal for 2 with drinks & service – around £80)
