Gabriel Waterhouse opens Waterhouse off Columbia Road
The successor to The Water House Project seats 24 in a Victorian workshop off Columbia Road, with an 11-course Northumbrian menu at £125 and a new wine bar.
Gabriel Waterhouse now cooks under his own surname: Waterhouse, the successor to The Water House Project, serves a £125 tasting menu to 24 guests at 7A Ezra Street, off the Columbia Road Flower Market in east London. Restaurant magazine profiled the opening on 25 September.
The chef runs it with his wife, Patricia Wakaimba. The dining room opened in August, on 6 August according to The Caterer, and a wine bar followed in September. The building is a restored Victorian workshop with an open kitchen, oak furniture Waterhouse designed himself and a courtyard garden whose raised beds grow herbs and flowers for the kitchen.
It sits a short walk from another recent east London arrival, Imad Alarnab's second Syrian Kitchen in Shoreditch.
The supper club that started in a flat now has a bar that takes walk-ins.
Gabriel Waterhouse cooks the North East
Dinner is 11 courses at £125, with an optional wine pairing at £75, according to The Nudge; lunch is a shorter eight-course menu. Dinner runs Thursday to Sunday, lunch Friday to Sunday. The menu draws on Northumberland, where Waterhouse grew up, and on Scotland and the northern coast: a Lindisfarne oyster with jalapeño cream and cucumber granita, scallop with perry and koji-fermented barley, smoked haddock with mussel porridge.
Singing hinnies, the Northumbrian griddle cakes, arrive with Laphroaig and lavender cream; dessert is a caramelised cream parfait with pear and pine. Suppliers include hand-dived scallops, creel-caught lobster and Herdwick hogget from the Lake District, Hot Dinners reported. At the bar, walk-ins get snacks such as crumpets with kippers, and oysters.
From a flat to a Victorian workshop
The Water House Project began as a twice-weekly supper club in Waterhouse's flat and became a canal-side restaurant on Corbridge Crescent in Bethnal Green, sold as social fine dining. It ran for five years and closed this summer when its lease ended. Waterhouse started cooking professionally at 23 under Herbert Berger at Innholders Hall and with the Galvin brothers at Galvin La Chapelle, then did stages at Lyle's, The Clove Club, The Ritz and Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons.
He has said the brick building reminded him of a derelict water mill his father restored in Northumberland, Restaurant reported. The new site keeps the single tasting menu and adds a bar that takes walk-ins. It joins a run of London openings built on farm and regional produce, such as Will Devlin's rooftop restaurant Nettle in Covent Garden.
The arithmetic is tight. Twenty-four seats, four dinners and three lunches a week leave little margin, and the bar is the part of the building that has to fill the gaps.
