Bob’s Lobster, Unit seventy-one, St Thomas Street, London SE1 3QX (020 7407 7099). Snacks and small plates £three.50-£eleven; big plates £12-£22; seafood tower £forty; desserts £6; wines from £25
In the movies that carry her name, the fictional Bridget Jones lives a brief, tear-stained, snot-smeared stumble from the reallocation of Bob’s Lobster, tucked into one of the areas below the newly renovated London Bridge station. It’s a tidy match because this will be precisely the type of vicinity Bridget might need to go to devour away the pain of a disastrous break-up. BeShe has to order the fries with mussel and bacon chowder precisely because they’ll make the entirety higher. I say “with” the chowder because that’s how the menu describes it; “submerged in” is towards the mark.
Behold: a deep, soothing bowl of wine and cream-based chowder, bobbing with Ford Cortina-orange mussels, into which has been dumped a whole serving of alternatively accurate chips. Pile a few extra pert mussels on the pinnacle at the side of a bacon crumb and finely diced inexperienced herbs and spring onions to make it seem like all the important food organizations had been included. There you have it: solace in a bowl. It’s a pescatarian tackle of Lancashire’s traditional chips and gravy. The ones on the top are crisp; underneath is a yielding, soggy mess of cream and seafood and potato and profundity. Lean over and shovel it in until your cheeks are slicked with soup, and the horrific mind disappears.
It’s an outrageous and joyous menu object – the phrase “dish” is probably pushing it – which sums up the whole-frontal assault of the meals here. The cooking laughs within the face of the basic American dishes it names on the menu. The succotash isn’t quite a succotash; the shrimp and grits could make a local of the nation of Georgia frown. None of that matters because the maximum of it’s far excellent. It’s referred to as Bob’s Lobster because it grew out of Bedales of Borough’s initials, the wine bar again close to the marketplace (which, because it takes place, occupies the site of what become the Greek eating place inside the original Bridget Jones movie). It enables the founder to be called Roberto Dann, a bona fide Bob concerned.
Dann changed into looking to diversify from their wine and small plates offering, so he imported a vintage red-and-white VW camper van and started out flogging lobster rolls out of it at Borough Market. The polished camper van sits within the high-ceilinged space they’ve taken over inside the London Bridge station’s crimson-brick undercarriage. It contradicts the Vinegar Yard Avenue grocery store that opened many months ago. What became, till very lately, a deserted and scuffed Bermondsey drag is now, on a heat Thursday nighttime, full of bustle and shout and the merry clink of glass on glass.
At Bob’s, a bar is knocking out foaming pisco sours. They have an oyster happy hour every Monday to Friday afternoon, with bivalves at a quid each. For £eight, they may make you a fish finger sandwich or fried bird with anchovy salsa verde, while £forty receives you a “seafood” tower” of toys “ers and prawns, salmon tartare, scallops, and tuna tostada. For a further £20, they’ll have the lobster tail on, too.
We begin with tuna tacos, tucked right into a deep groove chiseled down an elegant timber plank so it looks like a taco luge. It’s a significant quantity of engineering to keep these classic pockets of sashimi-grade tuna, wasabi-boosted guacamole, chipotle-flavored cream, and deep-fried wonton shells wholly contained. There are four of them for £nine. Each is three or four pleasing mouthfuls of pleasant raw fish, acidity, crunch, and spice. Unlike the chowder-splashed fries, eating these appears like an act of distinctive feature.
As does the succotash, which should likely come inside inverted commas. It maintains the essentials, being a mixture of sweetcorn and broad podded beans. The addition of courgettes, clean mint, and crumbled feta leads it off in the southern MediterMediterranean’sion in preference to the south of the US. More familiar is the lobster and crayfish roll in a soft, candy and toasted brioche bun: a bit of claw meat, several crayfish (to preserve the charge below £20), a mattress of crunchy coleslaw, and all is right with the sector.
