Exmouth Market is one of the few remaining streets in central London that retains genuine neighbourhood character while sustaining a dining scene of genuine quality. Jackson Boxer knows this. His new restaurant, Vesper, opening on 26 May in the corner site that was previously home to Taqueria, looks like a well-considered bet on a street that rewards exactly the kind of restaurant he makes best.
Boxer's track record is strong. Dove in Hammersmith established him as a chef who understands the bistro form at a level beyond most of his contemporaries — food that is precise without announcing its precision, rooms that feel lived-in because they are, wine that takes a serious attitude without requiring a serious budget. Brunswick House, in Vauxhall, extended his range into something more theatrical — grand space, ambitious cooking, a setting that borrows the grandeur of a Georgian building without being intimidated by it. Vesper draws more on the Dove template than the Brunswick House one, and that feels right for Exmouth Market.
What Vesper Is
The 70-cover site wraps around a corner at the western end of Exmouth Market, with timber-framed windows on two sides, a bar up front that is designed to attract drinkers as readily as diners, and a candlelit dining room tucked behind. The name comes from the Latin for Venus as the evening star — a name that carries the right atmospheric freight without straining for it.
The menu, as expected for a Boxer opening, does not arrive with a lengthy manifesto. It is a bistro menu in the most honest sense: well-sourced ingredients treated with the kind of care that makes them taste more like themselves rather than less. Expect the kind of cooking that earns a following among people who eat out a great deal — the food that serious diners seek when they do not want to work particularly hard at dinner.
Early indications from those who have seen the menu suggest a focus on British seasonal produce alongside the kind of European references — the good fat of a properly aged entrecôte, the brine of a well-treated bivalve, the grip of a sauce finished properly — that characterise Boxer's best work.
Why It Works
Clerkenwell has not always been well served by the kind of independent bistro dining that its population — creative workers, architects, lawyers, journalists, the kind of Londoners who live around Exmouth Market for precisely the right reasons — actually wants. Too many of the street's openings have been transient or underpowered. Vesper has the ingredients to become what the neighbourhood has been waiting for: a restaurant with a strong culinary identity, a relaxed room, and a reasonable expectation that it will still be there in five years.
Vesper will open for dinner Tuesday to Saturday and lunch Wednesday to Saturday.
8–10 Exmouth Market, Clerkenwell, EC1R 4QE.