The £185 Tuesday That Rewrites the £285 Reputation
Isaac McHale's Shoreditch Town Hall tasting room still sends out its fried chicken canapé — and on the right night of the week, the full menu costs £185 rather than £285.
A blue-tiled open kitchen sits at the middle of a Grade II Victorian town hall, and the first thing out of it is fried chicken. Small, singular — the canapé is the joke and the thesis at the same time. Isaac McHale has been running the room here since March 2013, and the fried chicken has been on the menu through all of it.
The Clove Club started as the Young Turks, a Dalston supper club in the late 2000s, which is roughly the origin story every serious modern British restaurant of a certain age wants to have. It landed in Shoreditch Town Hall — 1866, glossy blue door, the good bar next door — and for a stretch it was the London restaurant food writers flew in for. It ranked 27th in the world at peak. The distance from that peak is what the room is now navigating, and what any honest review has to sit inside.
Book the Tuesday and the reputation makes sense. At full Saturday freight, the room has to work harder than it does.
Editorial Deep
The fried chicken canapé arrives first, one piece per person, the size of a large marble. It is the signature and the mission statement: a serious tasting kitchen serving pub food without a wink. The batter shatters clean, the salt level is exactly what it should be, and the joke stops being a joke about halfway through chewing it. This is the dish reviewers have singled out for over a decade, and it earns the singling.
Conversation carries at normal volume. The room is busy but not loud — the acoustics of a Victorian town hall doing what tall-ceilinged Victorian town halls do, absorbing the noise before it becomes a wall. You can hear the person opposite you without leaning in, which is a lower bar than it should be and one most tasting-menu rooms in London fail at.
The advertised version is straightforward: book on OpenTable, up to three months ahead on a rolling basis, parties of one to six. The actual behaviour is that the good slots — Friday and Saturday dinner — go quickly and the interesting ones sit open. Tuesday and Wednesday dinners run the full tasting menu at £185 instead of £285, and those are the seats to hunt for. Wed–Sat lunch offers a three-course menu at £95, which is the cheapest way through the door. Card details secure the booking, no deposit is taken, and changes inside 72 hours incur charges. Larger than six, email reservations@thecloveclub.com.
The cheapest visit that still counts as eating well here is the £95 three-course Wed–Sat lunch, and yes, send someone to do exactly that. It is a genuine on-ramp to what McHale's kitchen is doing, in the room it is doing it in, without the expectations attached to a £285 dinner. The next step up is the Tuesday or Wednesday dinner at £185 for the full tasting — the same food a Saturday diner pays £285 for, on nights the room is quieter and the kitchen is not stretched. This is the ticket.
The condition currently unmet is calendar alignment. A return here works when you can build the visit around a Tuesday or Wednesday dinner, or a weekday lunch, rather than defaulting to the weekend. On those nights the food-to-bill ratio moves from arguable to obvious, and the room — quieter, less stretched — reads closer to the version the reviews from ten years ago described.
What to eat
Don't miss.
The fried chicken canapé arrives with the tasting regardless — the choice that matters is booking Tuesday or Wednesday dinner for the full menu at £185
“Isaac McHale still cooks well; the smart move is the £185 Tuesday, not the £285 Saturday.”
Book a weekday dinner or a weekday lunch and the room makes obvious sense; book Friday or Saturday at full freight and the London peer set — Ikoyi, Core, the Ledbury — starts asking harder questions of the middle third of the menu.
The Verdict
