The Kerfield Arms, 16 Grove Ln, London SE5 8SY

Weaponised Nostalgia™

Rich, muted hues of green spliced with off-whites and creams. Wainscoting. Rich chocolate hues of furniture. It’s the My First Gastropub Assembly Set© aesthetic, now ubiquitous, all allegedly stemming from The Eagle in Farringdon. Pubs that were once proud of burgers so structurally inept that they needed to be shanked with a steak knife through the centre suddenly felt the tide change.

Humble pubs across the country converted to gastropubs as if it were a cult, jumping through these aesthetic hoops, jacking up the prices and serving chips as a Small Plate, often leaving loyal customers to feel jilted. What used to be synonymous with comfortable familiarity with a ballast of basic, but at least decent food to sop up the booze, pubs became the tip of gentrification's spear.

The rise of ‘gastropubs’ became seemingly unavoidable; the hospitality equivalent of U2’s Songs of Innocence album, unironically foisted upon iPhones as if everyone would be thankful. The trouble is, there are great gastropubs, but the term has become a misnomer; with true examples buried in a pile of hacks and chancers, blindsided by the potential gains whilst ignoring the solid groundwork required to obtain them.

On the face of it, this is The Kerfield Arms — the latest addition to Camberwell, owned by Adam Symonds and chef Rob Tecwyn, three years after opening The Baring. It ticks all the aesthetic boxes, which would make you think the canary down the mine is dead on arrival. Inside, the room is sharply split between a bar area and dining room — both relatively voluminous, breezy spaces, but within that, a slightly sterile atmosphere.

The high ceilings and lack of acoustic dampening mean it has the clamour of a dinner hall, where you can hear everything yet nothing at all*. The Editor and I leaned over our table to chew the menu over, half expecting Amol Rajan to pop out from under the table and bollock us for conferring.

*Although true at the time of writing, thankfully, this problem has since been addressed.

That said, all this falls away when you do manage to pore over the menu. So often, gastro pub menus can be an Austin Powers photography scenario, but The Kerfield Arms’ is comprised of dishes that elicit ever-escalating effusion.

Last week’s review celebrated Rake’s skilful navigation of a nostalgia-laden take on the otherwise knackered ‘modern British’ trope, with a menu that was original yet paid homage, and The Kerfield Arms does similar.

It elevates British produce through the muscularity of classic European influence — most notably French and Italian — a coupling which works to great effect in the likes of Stroud’s Juliet or Copenhagen’s Silberbauers. Dishes are delivered by a dumbwaiter, which is something I’ve got a lot of time for — open kitchens are great for punters to gawk at, but all cooks deserve a safe space to swear.

Winking with a divot of olive oil and begging to be ploughed by its garlic-salted fried pizza dough, is an emolient taramasalata, the colour of Dulux primer, heavily freckled with dehydrated seaweed. The only downside is that there isn’t enough dough to go around, forcing you to eke them out, which is a gross feeling in itself, but usually the term refers to the amount of dip and not the dipped.

A nod to The Baring’s propensity for shish on its menu is one of Cornish squid and lardo, sculling in pul biber chilli butter with a tangle of monk’s beard, fennel and preserved lemon. Beautifully singed and capturing a ‘fresh off the BBQ’ energy, it’s exactly the sort of thing you’d expect Gill Meller to knock up of an evening on the beach.

Although the phrase ‘cheap as chips’ is decidedly dead, whoever worked the fryer tonight does so as if chips were the reason they even set foot in a kitchen. They’re that rare strain you get from a chippy in what feels like once a in a blue moon. Evenly crisp, no matter their dimensions, seasoned enough to actually enhance the flavour of the potato itself, along with a garlic mayo, honking to be taken just as seriously.

Panko’d and fried to a deep amber is a puck generously packed with pig’s head and smoked eel, on a warm tartare sauce, teeming with dulse. Emitting the brackish, ozone qualities evocative of hot beaches when the tide’s out, you can smell it before it even hits the table.

Monkfish, patched with bronzed love bites from the grill, is all pearly opacity fading into gently blushed translucency. Underneath, a tumble of Jersey pearls makes for pleasingly tender ‘pops’ while a ravel of vital friarielli gives its bittersweet, fibrous squelch, all of which ultimately underpin a prawn bisque that exemplifies the virtues of patience.

As we descend into another bloody summer, mentally preparing ourselves to play hopscotch over the pissed-up sunstroke casualties lying in our streets, The Kerfield Arms have cushioned the blow with a lingering farewell to spring. Hunks of rosy, golden fat-capped hogget and lightly dressed violet artichokes laze among a scattering of broad beans and burnished pine nuts, with a fat-constellated a la minute pan sauce, lapping around a sand bar of bagna cauda.

Whether it’s the inky depths of winter or the squinting heights of summer, at some petrol-imbued carnival, the smell of hot doughnuts causes me to move like a gun dog to a kill. A riff on strawberries and cream, The Kerfield Arms’ doughnut is a nostalgic pincer movement where the notion of ‘elevation’ is truly warranted.

Practically still bubbling from the fryer, it’s rolled in rose petal sugar, topped with a fine dice of Gariguette strawberries, lightly bound like a compote sitting in an ooze of chamomile custard. It triggers all those dormant touchstones; a frangible, granulated crust stowing sweet, fatty steam, the heat quelled by a cool centre. It may not be the cheap jam of yore, but the balance of this doughnut is an unmitigated Chef’s Kiss®.

Camberwell isn’t short of nostalgia for me — it’s where The Editor and I spent many fleeting weekends before we moved in together. A place always wreathed in mangal smoke, the heady homeliness of baking breads, it’s where we discovered Nandine and Pary Baban, who is frankly, a mother to us all. Using nostalgia as a cornerstone of appeal is nothing new to the world of food and drink, giving rise to the cringiest of neologisms, ‘newstalgia’. But rather than simply adopting this approach, The Kerfield Arms has utterly weaponised it.

While Symonds and Tecwyn no doubt smelled the chum in opportune waters in what was once The Crooked Well, the whole endeavour doesn’t smack of a Trojan Horse, despite all the woodgrain on show. The Kerfield Arms is a gastropub in the purest sense. Though it might need a little more time to break itself in, what’s already there fits the neighbourhood like a new, yet familiar, glove.