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The Yellow Bittern, review: A doorway to life before everyone became a bore

by News Room
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Review at a glance: ★★★☆☆

As any couple might attest, length is a matter of debate. I wonder if you can think of an example? But here’s another: long lunches. You know the sort: pub beforehand, late arrival, Champagne to start. Bread, butter, ballast. Bottle of white. Food either the entire menu or nothing really at all. Gossip. Bottle of red. Make it two. Cheese, pudding wine if they’ve got it. Coffee as strong as cocaine. Mutual enemies slated. Everyone declaring undying love for cigarettes but ignoring their phones as threats of divorce begin pinging in. “Lunch was good, wasn’t it?” someone will say. “Wasn’t it just,” someone will reply. “What did we have again?” Carriages at midnight, ambulances at three.

And so to the Yellow Bittern, a new Irish-British bistro open only for lunch, specifically lengthy, boozy ones. A strict pair of sittings: at noon (ours), and again at 2pm. Two hours? For a long lunch? I won’t play “mine’s-bigger-than-his” but come the f*** on. Absolute amateurs.

Lucy Young

Fortunately, everything else has promise. Name’s good, the Yellow Bittern being the bird who died for want of a drink in an Irish elegiac. A little poetry befits a place that is also a bookshop: in the window are titles from Arabella Boxer and Keith Floyd; downstairs are things like Tony Armstrong Jones’s London, likely here as his daughter Frances is the co-owner. She also waits tables disarmingly. The other owner is the chef, Hugh Corcoran, Belfast-born but Basque and Paris trained.

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