The Horses

Public House Group are a Made in Chelsea sideplot of a business, snaffling tired old boozers and paring them back to a charming sparseness. Call it Daylesford-core: bare oak, glowing hearths, mirrors flecked with rust — a garden centre by day; a village dance by night. They all look much the same inside and draw exactly who the team are after: Mr & Mrs Down-From-London, married at the family pile, calories justified by an afternoon’s padel. Everywhere else has been – how to put it – on-brand: The Pelican and Fat Badger in Notting Hill, The Bull in Charlbury. But The Horses is in Clerkenwell, as dense for restaurant quality as San Sebastian: Luca, Vesper, Bouchon Racine, the looming spectre of St John – and the Eagle, the original gastropub, two minutes away. Undeterred, Public House Group have swaggered into this battlefield with old-money confidence.

The ground floor was heaving, a proper pub with no whiff of gastro about it, warm with after-work chatter and the illicit thrill of midweek indulgence. We were swept up to a love seat in the first-floor dining room: a great place to bring your wife and quite a funny place to have brought your mate. A Southampton shipbuilder has fitted it out, evoking a life at sea without a single anchor or Big Mouth Billy Bass on the wall, but rather the day’s fish placed in cabins along the counter.

Meaty, briny, smoky and rich

Seafood is mostly from Fin and Flounder on Broadway Market, so we went all in with the fish. Our waiter gave fair warning before a signature dish arrived: smoked mackerel tail beside a matte blob of horseradish cream, for diners who don’t wilt at a stray bone or a note of something pungent. Meaty, briny, smoky and rich. Though a real psychopath might like the horseradish to kick harder, some of us have sinus problems that need clearing. Dressed crab has one universal rule – no shell – but anyone can break it. I once chewed a fragment at a Ducasse launch at The Dorchester, so nobody’s safe. But it was all clear at The Horses: a mound of flawless white meat, a quenelle of brown and roe creamed to smoothness, yet at £32 you’d hope for a few forkfuls more. 

Then the turbot for two, and what a turbot it was. Barbecue-rib sticky and grilled in the Basque cage, skin charred confidently over the coals, imparting just enough carbon bitterness to the flesh beneath, while rendering the collagen to a lip-smacking richness. What undoes it is the system. Every fish here arrives the same way: you pick your fish, then a sauce from a set of six. The garlic butter tasted faintly of the colour green and little else; the langoustine gravy turned everything to overboiled prawn shell; and the peppercorn clashed so meekly it seemed to apologise for itself. Zero for three, unfortunately. 

The Horses is warm, convivial, and distinct in the neighbourhood. It could be excellent if it married its sauces more carefully, or even skipped them for some lemon halves in muslin. Bouchon Racine, a neighbour running essentially the same format – backstreet boozer down below, belt-busting bistro up top – has combined the two seamlessly. Get the balance right, and The Horses could match it.

The vibe A handsome, old-money boozer with an upstairs dining room for a grown-up fish dinner.

The food Pristine British seafood, handled with confidence.

The drink Bone-dry white wines with a spine of pure stone, and frosty martinis to start.

Time Out tip End on the port, poured from a bottle the size of a small child.