Kitchen Party, Clerkenwell

Take one old, vacant building, add a restaurant, BBQ grill and some inventive cocktails, throw in some quirky workshops and lo and behold, you have the best kitchen party ever.

Nestled just to the north of Clerkenwell, Kitchen Party is a somewhat unusual pop-up. Rather than just going down the easy (well-worn) route of creating a bar, restaurant or event space, Bourne & Hollingsworth have decided to use the building to present a carefully curated selection of all three.

The resident acts, so to speak, will be changing on a six to eight week basis but until the end of June, the space hosts the wandering cocktail bar Fourth Wall, creative food design company Blanch & Shock, grilling maestros Rack & Ruin, purveyors of all things weird and wonderful The Robin Collective and – last but not least – the immersive Soviet feasts of the Russian Revels.

It’s impossible to visit all five in one visit, but, after an expertly-crafted cocktail or two at Fourth Wall, Blanch & Shock is probably a good place to start. You can tell from the pre-dinner snack of crudités – raw baby turnips served on a charred lump of wood, the day we went – that this isn’t going to be your typical restaurant meal.

The three-strong team have been operating for five years working on everything from one-off immersive dining experiences to longer, but no less experimental, pop-ups. Josh Pollen, one half of the kitchen team (along with Mike Knowlden) says that as much as they’re hoping to set up a permanent base one day, they enjoy the flexibility that a pop-up provides. ‘We try something new every time we make a menu, and change our menus entirely every single job,’ said Josh. ‘We’re inspired by so many people and want to try what they’re doing.’

As a result, the four-course menu at Kitchen Party (£36) is constantly evolving, depending on what ingredients are available each day – and what homemade produce has just reached its peak. ‘Our current interest is fermentation and microbiology – really long processes, particularly fermenting and culturing dairy products,’ continued Josh.

To showcase one of their recent experiments, the simple bread served before the meal comes with a ‘Six-day cultured butter’ in a little of its own buttermilk – both of which are tangy, grassy and incredibly moreish.

The menu is designed to showcase the ingredients at their best, but often in a different light from the traditional. On our visit, the menu included a dish of slow-cooked carrots that had been cooked in hay, their natural sweetness perfectly balanced with a salty sprinkling of air-dried beef and all tied together with a sweet clover cream.

The chefs are also interested in ‘weird varieties of herbs, flora and fauna’, and they ‘approach ingredients as they come’. So it’s not unusual to see a variety of unusual plants on the menu, from sea arrowgrass to mayweed and wild garlic flowers.

On Saturday 1 June, they will be serving a one-off offal dinner, as part of Nose to Tail Fortnight (which runs until 14 June), but if you can’t make it for that, they are currently scheduled to be part of the Kitchen Party until mid-to-late June. Booking is required, so get your reservation in now to experience some truly great cooking from this experimental, innovative company.

Kitchen Party
42 Northampton Row
Clerkenwell
EC1R 0HU

Tel: 0203 174 1156