The Modern Pantry

Press Reviews (11)

• Matthew Norman (7th January 2009)
  9/10
  
  “[B]y any standards”, says the critic, this Clerkenwell newcomer is a “gem”. The food is “simply beautiful” [and] [m]y God, this young woman [Anna Hansen] can cook”.
• Marina O'Loughlin (30th October 2008)
  3/5 stars
  
  Marina finds a mismatch behind the “so zeitgeisty”, “nostalgia”-heavy name of Anna Hansen’s opening and what she sees as so last century “fusion” dishes here, from this “seminal” ex-Sugar Club chef. The Georgian exterior is “perfectly lovely” and she likes the “bustling” ground-floor café “enormously”, thanks to its “chic melange of heritage colours, copper lampshades… and blinding white contemporary furniture”. By contrast, the “frosty” upstairs is “almost monastically featureless” in “cold Farrow & Ball-ish colours”. A trendy-sounding omelette (the signature dish here, she tells us) “works brilliantly” but otherwise she “can’t find anything to get wildly excited about” in the food. Other dishes are “fine, just fine”, in “weeny” portions, or like Indian take-out; and she “loathes” her Earl Grey chocolate tart pud.
• AA Gill (20th October 2008)
  2/5 stars
  
  Between observations on current economic gloom (“I told you so”… every restaurant closure is “a gap in the smile of civlisation”… “none of us wants to encourage dinner parties”) and five top tips for aspiring restaurateurs to survive the downturn, the Sunday Times’s man yawns loudly at this “grey” restaurant painted “in those National Trust matt flat tones that are called things like Dead Pigeon or Maudlin Mortician”. A “weird” omelette is “okay” but about all he seems to be able to recall, and with “atmosphere” – “obviously none” – he dismisses the place as a “a transient grey restaurant that vanished without trace”: “Was it expensive? I don’t think so. Was it worth it? Not really”.
• Terry Durack (2nd October 2008)
  14/20
  
  The Modern Pantry is “just the sort of modest gastrodome called for by the zeitgeist: buzzy ground-floor café, bookable first-floor dining-room, and cute little next-door deli”, says the critic. Of the two dining areas, the café is to be preferred.
• Giles Coren (2nd October 2008)
  Food 6/10
  
  “Gosh… [i]t must be getting on for a decade since I last headed down to Clerkenwell to a big, glistening space with exposed painted brickwork, where the open kitchen shimmers with brushed steel, the place is smoothly staffed by good-looking girls and tall, gay skinheads, and the menu is a typed A4 sheet of fusion cooking’s greatest hits… It just felt … so 1999. But in a good way. A great way. A wonderful way…”
• Jasper Gerard (22nd September 2008)
  8/10
  
  Like most reviewers so far, the critic “really like[s]” this Shoredtich newcomer.
• Tracey MacLeod (16th September 2008)
  Food 4/5 stars, Ambience 3/5 stars, Service 3/5 stars
  
  The setting may be “bare”, but the critic is seduced by some “perfect” starters at this Clerkenwell newcomer. Her main courses were a little more up and down, but she will “definitely be going back” when the more formal dining room upstairs shortly opens. “Too often these days, a restaurant meal tends to be interrupted by elaborate introductions from waiters who insist on talking you through every ingredient on your plate. At the Modern Pantry, it’s the food itself that stops the conversation, a reminder that in skilled hands, this kind of fusion food can transcend passing fashion to be a design classic.”
• Richard Vines (16th September 2008)
  
  The critic is “happy to be able to write about a new London venue where the prices are as low as the standards are high”. Even though it’s backed by the sometimes rather “corporate”-feeling D&D group, the establishment has an informal feel “more like a seaside eatery than a Clerkenwell restaurant”. “The starters and small plates set high standards that the rest of the menu does well to match… It’s the boldness of the combinations, the balance of flavors and the mix of textures that works so well in dish after dish… and you can eat three courses and have a drink or two for 30 pounds or so.” “In London, for cooking of this standard, that's almost giving it away.”
• Guy Dimond (29th August 2008)
  4/6 stars
  
  The critic visits Anna Hansen’s new venture (in conjunction with D&D), and finds uneven standards. The good, however, “outweighed the ill-judged”. “For vibe and novelty factor, this is most exciting place to eat in Clerkenwell right now, and it’s already filled with the area’s many self-consciously creative types”. He looks forward to next month’s opening of the “slightly fancier” restaurant, upstairs.
• Jan Moir (21st August 2008)
  
  No female solidarity on display on the Telegraph’s former critic’s website, and she seems to have visited a restaurant different from the one Ms Mascher rhapsodised about. “The Modern Pantry started life as a book concept not a restaurant”, she notes. “Once you understand that, you understand everything. For there is something rather transient and fry-by-night about the Pantry. Something a little cursory about its execution and lack of purpose that might well unsettle the sensitive diner… [I]n the ephemeral world of fashionable restaurants, this one seems more mortal than most”. This Pantry, she concludes “needs to be better stocked in every way to succeed”.
• Fay Maschler (21st August 2008)
  4/5 stars
  
  “You know that fusion works”, says the doyenne of critics, “when you eat something like chorizo, date and feta fritters served with a yoghurt dip, its innate piquancy championed by tamarind, and you think why has this not been done before?” In her traditional rôle as first-with-the news, Ms M brings us a ringing endorsement of this Clerkenwell newcomer.