Top Cuvée restaurant review: A promising little cuvée indeed

In what was once a no-go area for wine drinkers, Ed Cumming finds a small-plates bistro just 10 minutes from his house that he greets with open arms

Plate up: there are plenty of hams and cheeses to pick from (Photos Top Cuvée)

The cheapest bottle of white wine at Top Cuvée is £32. On Blackstock Road! That’s the Blackstock Road which links Highbury to Finsbury Park, rather than some other Blackstock Road you might be imagining in Belgravia or on the Upper East Side of New York.

Until quite recently this was basically a no-go area for wine drinkers, like the elephant graveyard was for Simba. Now, £32 for a bottle of wine! What do they take us for? Dotcom fraudsters? Naive tycoons? Witless oligarchs?

Perhaps more sophisticated wine drinkers would appreciate the mild skin contact and “flinty aromas” of the chenin blanc, which a phone search told me was available online for £10.99. The Austrian wine we drank by the glass for £6.50 is perfectly pleasant, but it is hard not to feel I was being dangled by the ankles and shaken out over N5.

Anyway, Top Cuvée is only open in the evenings, and not on Mondays or Tuesdays. By accident I went on the first night after the soft launch. A more glamorous critic was at the next table. In those pressured circumstances, I would have been understanding had the staff ignored me. It was gratifying to be treated well by smiley and well-informed waiters.

The bistro menu is short and reasonably uncomplicated, with dishes priced between £6 and £14, which is much more in line with expectation. In general, the simple things were the best. There are olives, cheeses and hams to nibble at with the drinks. Soda bread came with a little dish of outrageously salty Normandy butter. Can butter be too salty? I’m not sure.

Then croquettes and rillette and a house terrine. A gently wobbling titanium-white burrata came perched on two curves of roasted pumpkin and sprinkled with crunchy dukkah. For their loose-cut steak tartare they added smoked eel to the beef, which gave it a kind of sweetness which they cut through with horseradish and dill. Palourde clams with nduja tasted mostly of nduja, which is fine but why bother with the clams?

Restaurateur-chef Jackson Boxer is doing something similar with surf clams, smoked ham and chilli at Orasay, his beautiful new restaurant in Notting Hill, and I don’t quite understand it there, either. Call me an old-fashioned gentleman, but few things seem more deserving of undiluted admiration than a fresh clam.

Room for improvement: the interior could do with brightening up (Top Cuvée) (Top Cuvee)

Cod comes with an oyster emulsion and nori. I wasn’t totally convinced. But the vegetarian main, a beetroot sliced under cime di rapa, capers and radicchio leaves was more interesting than it sounded. The only dessert was crème caramel. Between here and Hicce, in King’s Cross, crème caramel looks as if it might be one of the trendy desserts for 2019.

Minor quibbling over the wine aside, I am glad this is no longer a culinary badlands. There’s Farang up the road and the Mountgrove Bothy round the corner. Top Cuvée is a welcome addition to the neighbourhood. I say “the”, but I mean “my”.

I’m not sure it is quite somewhere you would travel a long distance to visit, but I suspect that’s not the idea and it certainly doesn’t seem to be holding them back. Dinner for two flies over £100 with no trouble at all but the place was already heaving with attractive locals.

The room itself needs a bit of bedding in; some fabric or plants to absorb some of the chatter, and some more decoration on the walls, which were stark. But a new wine-led small-plates bistro 10 minutes from my house is a genre of restaurant I greet with open arms. A promising little cuvée indeed, if not quite the top.

Should you go? Yes, if you can walk there.
Would I go again? Yes, because I can walk there.

Top Cuvée, 177B Blackstock Rd, Highbury East, London N5 2LL; topcuvee.com; 020 3294 1665