Dining Out 030: Xanthe Ross at Cocina Studio
Dining Out 030: Xanthe Ross at Cocina Studio
Dinner in London Fields.
I don’t know if you have ever been to a supper club but in my experience they tend to sit somewhere between two poles. On one side is just “going out to dinner at a restaurant” and on the other, there’s “being invited over to the house of your most has-their-shit-together friend” – a place where all the cutlery matches and there are ‘guest plates’, and they own things like springform cake tins. Essentially the idea is that it’s a one-off meal cooked for a large, ticketed group, but it’s a little more personal and chilled than it might be if you’d just booked a regular table at a restaurant.
Usually punters are there because they’re a particular fan of the person who is cooking, and supper clubs have become an especial Thing in light of the way that celebrity cheffing is now in our phones as well as on the telly – chefs and food influencers who are popular online can convert followers into IRL bums on seats pretty easily.
One such chef is Xanthe Ross, who is synonymous with a particularly meticulously dressed, seasonal produce-heavy, and very Insta-friendly type of supper club – all patterned tablecloths and table-settings that are nicer than literally anything you have in your wardrobe. A while back I wrote something for Time Out about the “supper club phenomenon”, and happened to feature Xanthe in the article. After it went out, she extremely kindly messaged to invite me to her next event, and I know a good thing when I see it, so last Thursday, my friend Seán and I went along.
The dinner was a collaboration between Xanthe and Cocina Studio – a very snug London Fields dining room which throws plant-based supper club-style events – and was made up of five courses made using autumnal produce: your squashes, your wild mushrooms, your corn and so on.
After following Hackney’s answer to Hampton Court Maze to actually get inside (there’s no greenery and you’re wandering round the back of a residential building that has been turned into artists’ studios; they could feasibly charge like £20 for the experience), when I eventually made it, being inside the dining room felt kind of like a fantasy version of a dinner party – the type you’d love to host yourself if you weren’t the type of person who forgets to buy garlic and goes in a mood with everyone as soon as anything burns. There were long tables and checked tablecloths and handwritten menus at every place setting, and the light was so pretty and blurring that when I looked at myself in my phone camera to check my lip gloss, I couldn’t see literally any of my spots.
The setting sort of made me think again about something I’ve discussed before, which is that when we go out to eat, we are of course wanting to taste food that we probably couldn’t make for ourselves, but we are also investing in feeling a certain way. At this particular supper club the effect of this was twofold.
Firstly, the feminine, farmhouse-y aesthetic of the space felt as important as the food, and it felt like people were there to experience that as much as the dinner itself, which obviously speaks to how a lot of people eat now – you want to show you’re doing something as much as actually doing it.
Secondly, and kind of relatedly, as much as there was a little bit of self-consciousness as a result of the look of the place, everyone clearly felt relaxed. There were groups of friends big and small, talking about the dishes and having the craic, and I thought about how it was highly possible that each of the individual people at the tables probably felt tired from work that day (actually idk it was London Fields), or like, had had a nightmare with transport on the way or whatever. Entering a space like this, then, was (and is, because this applies to loads of restaurants on the whole) sort of a chance to shake that off, to share with friends, to eat something better than you would bother making for yourself, and to feel cute sitting next to a candle. What I’m saying via this minor digression, anyway, is that obviously dining out nourishes our bellies, but it’s best when it’s feeding our general senses of ourselves, as well – I was really reminded of that last Thursday, at Cocina.
To actually talk about the food for once in my life, anyway: the five courses were mostly brought out to share along the long tables, which I liked just because I love picky bits. First up was a very soft, very crisp-on-the-outside, springy-on-the-inside sourdough focaccia, served with bitter and delicious Honest Toil olive oil. That came with pickles like cauliflower, radishes, carrots – your standard small plates fare really – which were tart and tasty as pickles usually are.
The next dish, however, was a bit of a departure from the type of thing you can order at a wine bar, and I thought it was all the better for it. Everyone was served a small individual plate of ravioli, stuffed with baba ganoush – which you’d think would be weird but was actually brilliant – and tossed with an pretty potent and acidic tomato sauce. The gentle smokiness of the aubergine really cosied up to the sweetness of the tomatoes – and honestly, while the idea of the dish written down on the menu had made me raise an eyebrow, in practice I was totally sold.
It helped that the plate I was handed reminded me of visiting my grandmother’s house as a child. I have become a bit of a sentimental fool in my old age (I keep crying at Strictly at the minute), and I think little homespun touches like each person being served their pasta on a saucer or mismatched bowl – the way I used to be when I’d go to my Nonna’s to sit in her living room plastered with pictures of Pope John Paul II and play Animal Dominos with my dad and cousins – were probably why I felt so warmly towards the whole thing. There was a tenderness to it, a sort of “from my home to yours” type feeling that I found really sweet.
After the ravioli, the food really did just keep coming: there was a house-made almond ricotta with wild mushrooms and shallots, as a result of which I’d like to go on record and say that it’s absolutely crazy what they’re doing with nuts these days (so madly creamy; also slicing the cheese down the middle and serving it like a cake never gets less fun or decadent-feeling). That was followed by dense slices of Crown Prince squash, with the type of thick, taut skin I love to bite into, drizzled with chimichurri and paired with a whole chilli for a bit of a lift.
Dessert was delivered on a trolley (of course literally every single person in the room jumped to get a photo including me), and consisted of individual dishes of ice cream and gelato, the flavours of which we were invited to guess. I acquitted myself horribly and got precisely zero of them correct (by this point I was half a bottle of wine down and just kept repeating “is it pear??”), but they ended up including maté, sweetcorn and blackberry, all of which were great for the end of the meal, particularly the sweetcorn and its savoury end-taste.
When it was nearly time to go, there was a surplus of ice cream left over, so our table was just asked: is there anything you want any more of? So I made my request, and was generously delivered a silver coupe of perfectly spherical chocolate and coconut scoops, which were rich and deep but saved from cloying by the coconut. What a thing: extra dessert just because you asked. It wouldn’t happen at a restaurant – it’s more along the lines of being chucked the ice cream tub at your pal’s house at the end of dinner – and neither would this meal, really. That’s ultimately what I liked about it.
This visit was an invite but the words are mine all mine.
Dining Out is written by Lauren O’Neill and illustrated by Lucy Letherland. Weekly reviews are free to read every Thursday, and you can follow us on Instagram here, but if you’d like to see more, you can subscribe for £5 a month or £50 a year, to get extra content every second Sunday.
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