Tollington’s

With second restaurant Tollington’s, Ed McIlroy faces a profoundly different challenge. Four Legs at The Plimsoll was a remarkable underground success - London’s definitive cool restaurant for in-the-know foodies. It’s a superb restaurant we love dearly, but it probably benefited from being a pleasant surprise and a bit of an underdog. Now with a huge reputation and a towering wave of hype behind them (one they never asked for, it must be said) Tollington’s is certainly no underdog, but McIlroy is determined not to stray from their particular path.

That makes Tollington’s a very particular sort of restaurant. Inside you’ll find benches and stools lining the room, so get ready to squeeze up alongside your fellow diners. Dishes come out at a pace, and staff fly around the room in fifth gear with bottles of txakoli and tiny white plates. It’s slightly chaotic in the way that wonderful Basque pintxos bars often are - that’s all well and good when you’re on holiday, but when you’ve just come from work and queued to grab a metre of bench space, it might not be quite what some have bargained for. Such is the price of popularity.

If you’re willing to perch and scooch up a bit please, you’ll discover some top, top cooking here. Gorgeous, puffy devilled crab croquettes in a little pool of bisque, a proper tomato salad with gossamer-thin drapings of white onion, and lovely hunks of grilled fish. Everything comes in a generous glug of very good olive oil. A scallop dusted in summer truffle is a nugget of pure joy - sweetness from the scallop, married with that subtle earthiness of a fresh truffle grating. £6 for a 30 second endorphin rush seems a good price tag to us. We’ll add our voices to the growing clamour about Tollington’s chips bravas too, honouring Tollington’s chip shop heritage by combining beef fat chips with punchy allioli and bravas sauce. 

All in all that leaves Tollington’s as a bit of a conundrum. We think it’ll become a bit of a Marmite restaurant - one man’s riotous fun is another man’s disorganised bedlam after all. It won’t be for everyone, but we also wouldn’t have it any other way. As London’s restaurant landscape teeters on the precipice of homogenisation, it needs restaurants like Tollington’s more than ever.

Tollington's is an Iberian fish bar that sees Four Legs' Ed McIlroy take over an old fish and chip shop on Finsbury Park's Tollington Road. Although the menu is rather different, McIlroy has kept the original feel of a local chippy, making sure the tiling, fat fryers and formica floors stay in place whilst offering a new Spanish-led menu.

Similar to McIlroy and Allan's other establishment, The Plimsoll, Tollington's consists of a walk-in bar and a bookable restaurant. Their vision is inspired by time spent in Spain with their families, where they fell in love with the no-nonsense way of doing things. The idea of Tollington's is that guests can come in and grab a drink, get comfortable and eat good food, whether stopping for a quick bite to eat or a bigger plate, as though they were sitting down to tapas in Barcelona or pintxos in San Sebastian. Like sister pub The Plimsoll just down the road, Tollington's is cosy and likely to be packed at all times of day with diners grabbing tables or stopping to lean on a windowsill for a quick glass of vermouth and a tortilla.

On the menu, you will find plenty of regional dishes that include fried, cured and fresh options, and the drinks menu will serve everything by the glass along with Spanish beers, spirits and wines. You can expect the likes of Spanglish fusion chips covered in beef dripping, patatas bravas sauce, and aioli, devilled crab fritters, smoked eel omelette and pork neck with broad beans on the menu, backed up by zippy Spanish wines, as well as a selection of vermouths and sherries. The wine list is compact, offering no more than four options for red, white and rose. 

For retro charm and inventive takes on Spanish and British cuisine, you can't go wrong with Tollington's.