The beetroot starter has got technique, panache, creativity. Well, it has until the pal whispers, ‘They look like tampons’
What an odd place. Set beside a street-food pod in east London, the Frog looks as though it should be punting the same kind of wings’n’burgers as its less permanent neighbours. Floors are concrete, finishes are raw, furniture tights-snaggingly rough. Music blisters your eardrums. There’s a semi-outdoor bar space that looks like the sort of place you’d have your ears candled at a festival. Even the logo is curious: despite being created by an outfit called Fat Punk Studio, it manages to look like the sort of jokey blackboard drawing you’d once have found in wine bars called Bouzy or Chompers, run by cravatted leches fondly imagining themselves to be Keith Floyd.
The Frog’s chef and owner Adam Handling, backed by an outfit called Toucan Ventures (“venture capitalism for the Facebook generation”), has come from a stuffy hotel dining room background via MasterChef The Professionals, and I understand why he’d want to let his creativity gambol free. And off it duly gambols, like a mad scientist in a field full of opium poppies.
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