Sessions Arts Club

The entrance to Sessions Arts Club is an inconspicuous red door in the side of a conspicuous, Grade II listed building. Advertising the restaurant’s existence with a grand, imposing equivalent round at the front would be awfully ostentatious. It would also detract from the sense of secrecy on arriving at what is currently the worst kept secret on the London restaurant scene.

The red door opens into a dim, den-like reception room inhabited by Boy Smells candle vapour and someone who must spend huge amounts of time, illuminated by bobbing candlelight, telling people that there aren’t any tables available. Relieved that we have a booking, they direct us to a small, wood-panelled lift that takes us up to the bar and dining room on the fourth floor.

Plenty has been written about the splendour of the Sessions dining room and it’s impossible to be unmoved by it. Even the most committed contrarian, hellbent on indifference as a reaction to the hundreds of gushing descriptions, will have to concede that it’s a wonderful, spellbinding room. It feels, in fact, like the justification for everything else; if you find a place like this and turn it into a venue open to the public, lots of people are sure to be found in it thereafter.

The restaurant’s invisibility from the street, several storeys above Clerkenwell Green, cocooned by the rest of the building, means it feels like an exclusive refuge. Towering ceilings accommodate a mezzanine level overlooking the main dining area and there are arched Georgian windows, large fireplaces and bare, distressed surfaces losing their finish and colour. Flames from gas-powered lights flicker in a hipster-gothic display overhead.

Aforementioned difficulty in getting a table means we move through this enchanting scene with a mixture of smugness at having one and an awe about the room itself. We then sit down. We bask in the surroundings. The problems start.

The first begins with lots of wide eyes made at passing waiting staff who appear to have put us in a mental holding pattern. They rush past our table without acknowledging us at a speed that generates tangible air turbulence. How long is too long to order drinks? About this long. We eventually order. We wait. More wide eyes at passing waiting staff. The bar's lost the ticket, sorry.

Our drinks finally arrive and then we go through the same meerkat routine to order the food. The menu is as fashionable as the room; the descriptions are simple to the point of stark, with the food epitomising the current trend of culinary postmodernism, in which the most lauded dishes are ones that consist of a handful of ingredients presented with little in the way of garnish or complication.

The appreciation of this approach may be driven, at least in part, by the restricted access to restaurants during the pandemic. Their temporary unavailability created an opportunity to fully acknowledge eating out as a primarily social event and to recognise the basic pleasure in someone else considering and cooking the food. Minimalist menus like the one at Sessions are now often discussed in reviews as if the desire for anything more elaborate is a form of spiritual bankruptcy.

This brings us to the second problem, which is that the food at Sessions is not just simple, and not just expensive despite its simplicity, but also largely unremarkable. Blood is pushed around my body primarily to eat croquettes and warped financial priorities mean I have an unhealthy disregard for how much they cost. The crab croquettes on the menu here at £5 each, however, aren’t even disappointing for a fiver - they’re just disappointing. A homogenous paste of brown crab meat is encased by a shell that doesn’t taste hugely different to the outer of frozen supermarket scampi. And while that's undoubtedly mean, it's written from a sense of amazement that so many critics have expressed such love for these croquettes.

Panisse - savoury churros made of chickpea flour - sprinkled with thyme and salt are pleasant enough but they still engender apathy rather than wonder. A plate of calamarata pasta (rings of squid and pasta in a tomato sauce) leaves us non-plussed again; the fact the sauce 'really tastes of tomatoes' doesn’t seem like justification for the effusive praise the dish has received elsewhere. By now, I can see Sessions’ stock plummeting in the eyes of my friend with each plate brought to the table: "It's... just erm... so pretentious."

To make matters worse, a natural white wine that wasn't listed as such, smelling stereotypically natural, is delivered to her midway through dinner. When our waiter generously agrees to change it, the sommelier is sent over. She begins talking to us about options before abruptly announcing that she’s forgotten something and wandering off. I often wonder how she is, as we never see her again. We order more wine when our waiter is back in the vicinity; a more conventional French white and a syrah from Californian producer Piedrasassi, which is obviously good quality but still fairly closed - understandable given it's only a couple of years old.

Florence Knight, formerly of Polpetto in Soho, is the chef responsible for the pared back menu and for an almost magical dish of eel and potato. It feels like a sudden punch of sunshine through a blanket of cloud. Laminated layers of fried potato are interspersed with slices of smoked eel fillet to create the most wondrous confit potato brick that's surprisingly light but incredibly complex and savoury. Roe, rocket, creme fraiche, edible flowers and lemon give various contrasts of acidity, sharpness and pepper for balance, and make a plate of food that's as aesthetically pleasing as our surroundings.

It's verging on the tragic to return to form with slices of beef sirloin in an intensely rich sauce made from Durrus cheese, which seems one-dimensional in comparison with the previous dish. There's nothing to contrast the richness or the texture and it's hard to believe it's from the same kitchen. We push the last bits of beef around the plate like the spoilt, crestfallen children we seem to have become and say resigned, solemn things about not bothering with pudding.

Sessions Arts Club is undoubtedly a place to see and a place in which to be seen but the food feels distinctly secondary to the whole experience. The restaurant is expensive and pretentious [you've used the phrase 'culinary postmodernism' in this review - ed.], and ultimately, it's difficult to recommend parting with so much money for the food on offer when there are so many worthy alternatives, regardless of how glorious the place looks once inside.