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Booking Office 1869: ‘The style is Phileas Fogg Acid-Safari chic' – restaurant review | Grace Dent on restaurants
‘Until now, I’ve never been truly excited by the food offering at St Pancras station. We’re not at the Delice de France kiosk any more’
Booking Office 1869 lives inside St Pancras International, which is that rarest of British railway stations in that it’s a highly enjoyable one to linger in. Yes, Didcot Parkway will have its fans, but St Pancras is a destination in its own right, where splendid gothic 19th-century architecture meets shimmery luxury boutique shopping, and it’s also colonised by chic Parisians awaiting the Eurostar and enjoying the Tracey Emin light sculpture. At St Pancras, even the people clanking away on those public street pianos have a working knowledge of Ludovico Einaudi.
That said, until now, I’ve never been truly excited by St Pancras’s food offering, although the humongous Wetherspoons, The Barrel Vault, on the ground floor is never anything short of heaving. However, the recent revamp of the Booking Office – a bistro on the first floor, but also accessible via the St Pancras hotel – is interesting for several reasons. At the helm is chef Patrick Powell, who is also behind one of London’s loveliest, and possibly most underrated fine dining experiences, Allegra at The Stratford next to the Olympic Park. Powell is a unique talent, and Allegra’s menu is ever-intoxicating, mixing hearty Irish cooking with intricate French technique and tangential modernity: fried oysters with ginger and seaweed, lobster vol-au-vent with buttered leeks, and chicken in vadouvan spices with pommes Pont Neuf and pickled jalapeños, to name just three. Powell is a fan of classic cooking, but he’s also a feeder and a creator of lavish comfort food.
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