T
he real test of a restaurant (he writes for perhaps the 700th time at the top of a review, before saying something completely different each time) is how well it can provide for entirely the wrong clientele at completely the wrong time. How will a sushi place, for example, deliver a birthday party for a guy who doesn’t like raw fish? What can a vegan joint do for a drunk Jeremy Clarkson after the football? What will the Ritz offer a grubby student for breakfast? How will Nando’s feed the Queen?
So hats off to Tollington’s in Finsbury Park, the epitome of the no-booking, vertical eating, small plates joint for hip young gunslingers on the Gen Z- millennial border looking for a big night after work, for feeding the Coren family lunch after church last Sunday and getting it spot on.
I’d wanted to go to Tollington’s for ages (as I wrote way back when it opened) but couldn’t. They were doing progressive Spanish-accented fish and drinks over the barely refurbished bones of an old Finsbury Park fish shop and didn’t take reservations. How was that going to work? I’m 56, with a job, wife and children. I know literally no one who would say “yes” to the question, “Wanna swing by a revamped chippy in N4 full of people half our age sucking on fish heads and drinking cider out of jam jars, where they may or may not give us dinner?”
