It’s niche, but I am going to use the front of this review to say how much I dislike Canary Wharf. Having been two weeks in a row, getting lost on both occasions, I’ve come to the conclusion that it is London’s only neighbourhood that appears to have been designed by a management consultancy. Streets disappear into shopping arcades, arcades become office lobbies, office lobbies emerge beside fountains that seem to exist purely to reassure the very wealthy. Every building is taller than your expectations and somehow less memorable. It is a place that has mastered the remarkable feat of being both enormous and impossible to locate yourself within. You don’t arrive in Canary Wharf so much as become temporarily absorbed by it, emerging three hours later where you started, only with a vocabulary that consists almost entirely of verbs masquerading as nouns. Leveraging. Onboarding. Cascading. Circling back. It is a village populated almost exclusively by people whose jobs involve moving money they will never actually touch.
By the time we meet Julie any thoughts of a preprandial martini at Hawksmoor are out of the window. We’ve come out of the Elizabeth Line exit and are trying to locate her at one of the many exits of the Jubilee Line, which to compound things further are located approximately twenty miles away from each other. Google Maps had given up, leaving me to resort to something called a phone call to find her position. When we do locate her it’s another twenty minutes back the way we came to the restaurant that Julie spots on the right, over the bridge, near the big naval boat that I hope is switched off at the mains. It’s bonkers to think that I’ve only known Julie Friend since Italy in May, and yet here we are. She’s a former Masterchef winner, baker extraordinaire, judge of anything worth judging, and now Chair of The Guild of Food Writers. I’ll try to keep my typos to a minimum.
Roe is massive. I thought it was about two-hundred covers and yet Google tells me that figure is closer to five hundred. We walk through the vast space of the indoor; curved white walls hover over the open kitchen, whilst light pours through vast panes of glass on the other side with enough generosity to remind you that daylight remains the greatest interior designer of them all. Outside on the terrace, there are three cocktails, of which my brioche martini was tooth-achingly sweet and the other two were excellent.
The menu reads like a less-scary version of their sister site, Fallow. We plump for a mix of snacks, skewers, and flatbreads, ignoring the larger plates on account of them being less fun to share amongst three. Chicken wings arrive deboned from the elbow-up, stuffed with a chicken and tarragon mix, before being fried and dredged through a sriracha honey. These are excellent. Padron peppers are dusted in a gorgeous citric mix to bring some light to the dish, whilst a blooming onion with a good amount of MSG loitering in the mix starts off great but quickly becomes hard work. It’s a lot. Maybe we need the two beer towers on the neighbouring tables.
Flat breads shaped like mini-pizza come generously filled; one with an abundance of crab that’s overwhelmed somewhat by a tomato and chilli jam, and another with loads of Tunworth, crispy sage, pear, and honey, that’s most likely the dish of the afternoon. Three skewers, each punchily priced at between £10-15, range between the squidgy mushroom with garlic and curry leaf emulsion, to a quite brilliant chicken tsukune skewer with a sausage that glistens with smoke, soy, and ginger ponzu. A lamb shoulder skewer comes draped in pickled guindilla chilli and a black pepper ranch. You have to work for the flavour, though the reward is there. Roe do flavour and they do fun. You can see why it’s heaving.
Of the three desserts only one really stands out, and it’s somewhat predictably the one that everyone bangs on about. A roasted banana parfait with caramel centre. Notes of peanut, vanilla, dulce le leche, and plenty of salt. So pleasingly unsweetened and so incredibly moreish it’s been categorised as a class A. The bill for the three of us including another cocktail and a little wine is a very fair £285, and off we saunter back to the Elizabeth Line for a negroni or three in Bar Termini. Given its more central location, I’m inclined to say that Fallow appeals to me more, though should you ever find yourself lost amongst the sprawling skyline of Canary Wharf, Roe is the ideal sanctum.
8/10
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