Tollington’s, 172 Tollington Park, Finsbury Park, London N4 3AJ
In search of reliving San San Sebastián, we found the blue pill
Bored with The War on Terror ruining September 11th for everyone, I reclaimed it by proposing to The Editor in San Sebastián in 2023. 39°C heat, in humidity so thick you could chew the air, shirtless, overlooking the ocean, I asked if she fancied it. The rest is history.
Discovering txakoli was a revelation; a lightly sparkling wine synonymous with the Basque Country that’s so affordable, they start pouring it before they even get to your glass. Never far behind were pintxos — generally two-bite affairs of which every bar laid on an array, yet each had its speciality.
This part of the world puts bar crawls to shame and instead turns it into an art form, where the unspoken rule of non-committalism reigns — stay for a couple of glasses and bites, but then sling your hook.
Hogging a spot and camping out all night, cordoning off half the floorspace with your gaggle of mates, is a social faux pas; everyone knows to keep moving, understanding that stagnating the flow is sacrilegious.
Holiday comedowns are a natural part of the grieving process, but returning from the Basque Country took things to new depths. Only an uprooting of the UK’s warlike approach to drinking culture would even begin to set the groundwork for pintxo bar culture.
Instead, we remained in a constant state of bargaining, pretending that Small Plates and bottles of txakoli up to ten times the price were taxes we paid to relive a glimpse of what, by now, felt like a dream. Until recently.
Tollington’s is the work of Four Legs chef, Ed McIlroy who’s managed to convert a chippy into a San Sebastián Simulator, where the only stark differences are hard-coded cultural inevitabilities. The emphasis is on sitting rather than the hit-and-run posture of standing, because it’s an experience to be soaked in and the prices, but that’s because this country is largely fucked. Not their problem.
A patchwork of Iberian influence, there’s a Basque thread running throughout, namely the txakoli and chistorra. Sitting at a gleaming two-top, we’re taken by the wrist back to San Sebastián’s Bar Ricardo, which seldom gets mentioned at all, it seems, yet is perhaps one of the best spots in the Gros neighbourhood.
Par-cooked chips glow under lights where the battered fish used to, ready to be fried to order in tallow, burly beefheart tomatoes are stacked above, and the day’s specials are scribbled onto the overhead extraction.
While waiting for the full menu to become available, there’s a technicolour salad of peppers and onion, mingling with chunklets of octopus in a sweetly puckering vinaigrette. What’s this? A whole plate of unprompted bread?
I can only imagine influencers pulling that face as if using a bidet for the first time, in awe of something ‘free’. It’s these little cultural imports that really do make the difference, as you fight the cynical suspicion to see it on your bill at the end, which you do not.
Rounds of baguette are piled with saltfish and potato, like a coarse brandade, crossed with guindilla peppers, laminated in grassy olive oil. Another is mounted with minced tomatoes that elicit a rare fist pump that would otherwise have me cursing the Natoora Mafia — they actually taste like tomatoes. On top is a finger of chistorra; shimmering in its own rendered fat, the skin all snap and pop, kicking with parika and garlic
Pearly scallops dolloped with smouldering sobrassada and dotted with sea leek have been thrown under the grill, the smell evocative of ‘warm beaches’, as Rick Stein would say. Mopping the shells spotless, you’re likely doing more than the KP a favour, as I’m sure they’ll end up being ashtrays here or at their sister, The Plimsoll, down the road.
Squid, straight from the plancha, reaches textbook texture upon hitting the table. Scattered with parsley, laced with olive oil and a squeeze of lemon. It’s exactly the sort of dish you have in your mind’s eye as the focus evaporates from your day job, leaving the residue of holiday plans.
It’s time for a half-time sarnie, and it’s arguably the strong and silent type on the menu. The bread crackles on top with the texture of cracked earth, giving way to a warm, billowy crumb, dewy with the steam of toasting — the inside crisped by a liberal dousing of olive oil and pressed to the plancha. Slices of pork loin marinated in white wine and garlic are so supple, they allow a clean bite from top to bottom. Piri piri and mustard sit on the side in generous measures to be tipped out with abandon.
An Anglicised patatas bravas sees a pile of tallow-crisped chips torrented with a thoroughly pungent allioli and bloodied salsa brava, unlike any I’ve had before. It’s perhaps Tollington’s most lauded dish, understandably, showing an ability to pay homage to roots in more ways than one.
More free bread? In this economy? If I didn’t know better, I’d suspect Tollington’s of being sympathetic to an appetite, and it’s just as well, because the Moperation is still in full-swing. An outlier in The Simulation is an absolute unit of a mackerel, under a load of coriander and dressed in XO sauce. Exceptionally cooked, the bones come clean away, evoking the cartoon-like overdub of a chromatically ascending xylophone.
Another welcomed departure from the mission statement, the chocolate mousse is beautifully aerated yet still with an ooze, generously studded with smoked almonds that accentuate the closed fist thwacks of cocoa throughout. It hits the brief entirely — intense without cloy and substantial without heft.
Slavoj Žižek warns us about the perils of achieving our fantasies, but if he’s so smart, why does he wipe his nose with his eyes? In any case, maybe he’s right, because nothing brings about the cold backhand of reality like the price of txakoli in the UK. Look, I get it; things cost to be imported, and we did get free bread, but paying over £40 a bottle in the name of nostalgia is like scratching eczema. To say nothing of it being served at room temperature.
That said, Tollington’s has managed to forge and foster something special — a sense of place and genuine homage that ran the risk of coming off as gimmicky and cynical. It cultivates an atmosphere almost identical to the likes of San Sebastián, charged with a clamour that only comes from dopamine and endorphins surging in good faith.
While tepid txakoli is an outright sin, Tollington’s is a tribute to that which is otherwise culturally impossible, all because the UK can’t be trusted to have nice things. It specialises in a whole menu of blue pills, encouraging immersion into memories of holidays that come seeping back. Any taste of that realm is welcome, even if it is just for a couple of hours.