The £200 Turbot That Anchors a First-Floor Room in Shoreditch
Tomos Parry's wood-fired dining room above a Redchurch Street awning still turns on one fish and one price. Book early, sit at the bar if you didn't.
The turbot lands on the pass with the char still audible — skin blistered dark from the wood fire, the meat underneath white and giving. It gets carved tableside, portioned onto warm plates, and served with the kind of quiet ceremony that a £200 fish earns without asking for. Everything else on the menu is, in some sense, orbiting this dish.
Tomos Parry — a Welsh chef by way of the Basque country — opened Brat above a Redchurch Street shopfront. The name is the old English word for turbot, which tells you where the priorities sit. Seven years on, it is still the reservation that Shoreditch defends, and the room still cannot really seat everyone who wants in.
The turbot is the correct order and the correct price, and everything else on the menu is a negotiation with that fact.
Editorial Deep
The turbot arrives at 1.8 kilos, £200, and the entire ordering strategy of the meal collapses into it. The skin is blistered black in patches from the wood, the flesh beneath is soft and flaking cleanly off the bone, and there is a low note of smoke that runs underneath the fish rather than sitting on top of it. Order it. Split it between two or three. Build the rest of the meal around what's left of your appetite.
You can hold a conversation at a normal volume, which is not something to take for granted in Shoreditch on a Friday. The room hums rather than roars — cutlery on plates, wine being poured, the low percussion of a wood fire somewhere behind the pass — and the acoustics of the wood-panelled walls seem to absorb the edges of it.
Reservations go through SevenRooms on the restaurant's website, and on paper this is a straightforward booking. In practice, the good tables — Friday and Saturday dinner, anything after 7pm — go weeks out, and if you're trying to book a group for the turbot the runway is longer. Open the calendar as far ahead as it will let you, take the first Thursday or Sunday lunch slot you can hold, and treat weekend evenings as a bonus rather than the plan.
The bar-side version is the answer to the question of whether Brat is worth recommending to someone who doesn't want to spend £200 on a single fish. Grilled bread with anchovy, smoked potatoes and a glass of wine gets you into Parry's cooking without the tasting-menu commitment, and it is the version this reader would put a friend on to first. That it exists at all — a lower-friction, lower-spend door into this kitchen — is what stops the restaurant from reading as a luxury purchase-only proposition.
The condition currently unmet is a second person who wants to eat the turbot. Solo, or as a two-top on a Tuesday, the case for coming back defaults to the bar and a shorter meal — which is a good meal, but not the reason to keep the restaurant on rotation. The return trip that justifies itself is four people around a 2kg fish, ordered a month in advance, with the wine list opened properly and the beef chop as a supporting act rather than a competing headline.
What to eat
Don't miss.
Whole turbot, grilled bread with anchovy, smoked potatoes
“The turbot is the meal, the room is small, and the bar downstairs is the smart backup.”
Come as a group of four with a booking made a month out and order the fish; come alone and eat at the bar.
The Verdict
