The Dining Room: Where the Kitchen and the Back Bar Are Equally Serious

This is the first in a new monthly format — full restaurant reviews, judged the way SlowSip judges everything: by what's in the glass, and by whether the people serving it care as much as the people cooking the food. Sebastian Rowe on Brat.

4 Redchurch Street, Shoreditch, London E1 6JL bratrestaurant.co.uk

Above Smoking Goat. One Michelin star, retained in the MICHELIN Guide UK 2026. Book ahead, particularly for weekends — the room is small. If ordering the whole turbot, it's worth flagging at the time of booking since it's cooked to order and a substantial dish best shared.

Brat sits above Smoking Goat on Redchurch Street behind an entrance you'd walk past without noticing — a plain doorway, a set of stairs, and then a room that smells of woodsmoke before you've taken your coat off. Tomos Parry opened it in 2018 having made his name at Kitty Fisher's, and the concept has stayed defiantly single-minded since: a wood-fired grill against the back wall, a menu built around Basque coastal cooking filtered through Welsh ingredients, and a room with wood panelling and parquet floors that feels more like a well-worn workshop than a restaurant trying to impress anybody. It earned a Michelin star within a year of opening and has held it consistently since, including in the current 2026 guide.

What makes Brat the right choice to open a format built around drinks and food together, rather than drinks alone, is the wine list — and specifically who built it. Parry didn't hire a sommelier and leave them to it. He brought in Dan Keeling, co-founder of Noble Rot, whose own restaurants have some of the most talked-about wine programmes in London, and had him build the list through Keeling Andrew & Co, Noble Rot's own importing arm. The result is not a list assembled to complement the food as an afterthought. It is a list built by people whose entire professional identity is wine, working for a kitchen that takes the pairing seriously enough to hand over control rather than dictate terms.

"Parry didn't hire a sommelier and leave them to it. He brought in the people who wrote the book on wine lists and handed over control. That's the whole review, if you want the short version."

The Room

The dining room is on the first floor and seats perhaps sixty people across rows of close-set tables that lean communal without quite committing to it — you'll hear the table next to you, and they'll hear you, and nobody minds. The grill dominates the back of the room, open to view, staff moving constantly between it and the pass. There's no attempt at hush or ceremony. It is loud in the way a good kitchen is loud, and the noise is part of the appeal rather than a design failure. It suits a group better than an intimate dinner for two — worth knowing before you book, whichever you're planning.

The dish Brat is best known for is the whole turbot, cooked in a specially designed steel clamp over the wood fire and served to share — substantial enough that ordering it changes the shape of the whole meal, and worth it if your party and appetite suit a large centrepiece dish. It is not, on the evidence of what regulars and reviewers keep coming back for, the only reason to book. The bread and anchovy, the soused mackerel, the duck rice, and the Basque cheesecake all turn up repeatedly in other people's accounts of the best things they've eaten here, and a meal built entirely around avoiding the turbot would still be a very good one.

The Wine List

This is where the review earns its place on a drinks-focused platform. The list is organised into loosely defined sections — easy drinkers, classics, the more obscure end of things — and rotates a single producer's range as a featured focus most weeks, giving regulars a reason to keep paying attention rather than defaulting to the same bottle. The natural and low-intervention end of the market gets real space here, but not at the expense of the more classical producers a serious drinker would expect to see. It is, by the account of more than one wine writer who covers London seriously, among the best lists in the city — not because it is the largest, but because every bottle on it appears to have been chosen by someone who has actually tasted it and has an opinion about why it's there.

Prices sit in reasonable territory for a Michelin-starred kitchen — the sweet spot, by most accounts, running through the £50–£80 range, where the list does its most interesting work. This is not a wine list designed to extract maximum margin from a captive audience. It is a wine list designed by people who want you to drink well, which is a different and much rarer thing.

The Verdict

Brat is not a restaurant that treats wine as a category to be managed alongside the more important business of cooking. The decision to hand the list to Dan Keeling rather than build it in-house is the clearest possible signal of how seriously the kitchen takes what's in the glass, and the list itself justifies that seriousness on every visit I've made. Combine that with cooking good enough to hold a Michelin star for the better part of a decade against a very unshowy room, and you have exactly the kind of restaurant this new format exists to cover: a kitchen and a back bar operating as genuine equals, rather than one propping up the other.

Service has occasionally drawn mixed notes elsewhere — the room's energy cuts both ways, and a table can wait longer than it should on a busy night. Book ahead, particularly for weekends, ask about the turbot if a large shared dish appeals, and let the wine list steer you somewhere you wouldn't have picked yourself. It rewards that trust more reliably than most lists in London. bratrestaurant.co.uk