Things start well with a pair of pork fritters flecked with bright green splodges of lovage puree. You can go a la carte, but the 10-course tasting menu is the main event, and it’s very reasonable at £40, with matched wine an extra £35 or matched beer for £25. It’s called The Frog not because the concept is as mad as a box of them, but because this is the first “leap” – like a frog? – in a planned series of restaurants (for me it brings to mind the Mark Twain witticism that if you eat a live frog in the morning, nothing worse will happen to you all day).
It has a wilfully disagreeable logo, which looks like it was designed by a teenage boy as a sideline to his business making posters featuring cannabis leaves. Half of the dining room sits beneath a hazmat igloo filled with ivy and palms. The Frog takes the macho-fiddly cuisine championed by Nuno Mendes and sticks it into what looks like an antipodean-coffee-shop-cum-yoga-space. If you’ve eaten in Caxton, the hotel restaurant he headed up in St James, you might recognise a few of his new restaurant’s more outré dishes, but even that won’t fully prepare you. It’s hard to believe this is the same chef who was praised for his simple, unflashy cooking when he came runner-up on Masterchef: The Professionals in 2013. Then he’ll squeeze some lime on top and add some dill. If there’s a way to make something more colourful, to extract a little more flavour, to add an unusual texture or three, Handling will do it. Scottish chef Adam Handling, therefore, owes a debt of thanks to those unsung heroes their handiwork is stamped all over the menu at his new Shoreditch restaurant, The Frog, from amuse bouche to dessert.
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