Holy Carrot, London E1: ‘As good as plant-based dining gets’ – restaurant review | Grace Dent on restaurants

Holy Carrot has, cough, taken root in Spitalfields, east London. It’s the second sprouting from this plant-based restaurant with a name that’s especially hard to sell to meat-loving friends. “Please come with me to a vegan restaurant,” one might say. “It’s not one of those pious places, honest! Oh, um, the name? Holy Carrot.” In fairness, though, it’s generally tricky to cajole meaty people to venture anywhere vegan or even vegetarian, because there’s always a sense that your steak addict acquaintance is enduring their meal “as an experiment”, and despite quite charitably being “willing to be convinced”. Sigh … it’s exhausting.

Still, chef Daniel Watkins’ first Holy Carrot restaurant over in Notting Hill has made its name over the past couple of years as a place where you can take a mixed group without someone throwing a tantrum about the dearth of pork chops. Watkins’ preference for live-fire cooking and fermentation led to the likes of roast aubergine with koji mole, smoked tofu stracciatella with rhubarb nam jim, artichoke schnitzel with pickles and curry sauce and sweet potato with corn miso butter. Take your miso-Marmite koji bread, scoop it though some smoked mushroom chilli ragu, then take a sip of your black walnut gimlet to put a sparkle in your eye, or even just a Holy Carrot 0% spritz with no-waste carrot molasses.

‘Order and immediately inhale’: Holy Carrot’s king oyster mushroom vol-au-vent with peppercorn and dulse sauce.

The Notting Hill menu is fully vegan, but it has never been po-faced or pompous; in fact, it’s the zenith of imaginative, experimental and modern, which is what the best plant-based cooking should be. The new Holy Carrot, just on the edge of the famous market, however, is not vegan, because they’ve added a scattering of vegetarian dishes, such as a whopping British king oyster mushroom vol-au-vent with peppercorn and dulse sauce. It’s a hard-and-fast rule of mine that, regardless of time of day, dimensions or filling, I will order and immediately inhale any vol-au-vent spotted on any menu, and the Holy Carrot one is a real beauty, stuffed as it is with creamy, sliced funghi in a glorious, buttery sauce. There’s also a Georgian-style khachapuri that’s fresh, pillowy and warm, comes topped with an oozing baked egg and black pepper, and may well be Spitalfields’ best new brunch dish. Order one of those with the Japanese potato salad (a pile of mash covered in umami-rich, bittersweet pickles) or a plate of hispi baked in embers and served with masala.

Holy Carrot’s ‘daintily slender’ tempeh and smoked tofu schnitzel with celeriac remoulade and Café de Paris butter.

What else is different about Holy Carrot Mark 2? Well, it has more of an elegant, classic restaurant vibe – some tables even have tablecloths, for example. Yes, tablecloths are back in restaurants, by the way, and very du jour. Over lunch, we dragged sourdough through a jammy, sticky plate of pulverised beets that had been baked in coal and turned into a Turkish-style ezme salad. The key here was the sweetness and the consistency: semi-lumpy, nicely claggy, almost meaty. We shared a tempeh and smoked tofu schnitzel, daintily slender and with a crunchy, breaded coat, on a lake of aromatic Café de Paris butter and topped with celeriac remoulade. Plus that sensational vol-au-vent. Next time, I’ll make room for the “sexy” tofu croquettes with smoked carrot XO and mustard greens.

Desserts are serious, too – made from scratch and not merely afterthoughts; there’s not a drab sorbet in sight here. On the day we went, there was a Basque cheesecake with rhubarb that didn’t remotely embarrass itself in the authenticity stakes. It came in a sharing portion for two, with sweet, gently sweated rhubarb in a pretty, stainless-steel gravy boat. In case that wasn’t cute enough, they also brought us some hot, fresh madeleines with a jug of warm caramel to go with our coffees; I’ve heard good things about the sticky toffee pudding and chocolate crémeux, too.

‘Desserts are serious, too’: Holy Carrot’s chocolate crémeux with malt caramel.

Holy Carrot’s style is the sort of vegetarian cooking that I’ve loved watching flourish in recent years. This is not junk-food veggie such as Lewis Hamilton’s beleaguered Neat Burger, which went into liquidation last summer, or even Mildreds, which of late seems to me to have become increasingly reliant on burgers, heavy mayo and the like. Neither is it one of those rather retro, Cranks cookbook-style vegetarian restaurants where you end up knee-deep in pulses done 18 ways, novel nut roasts and eco-beakers of elderflower claret.

Crucially, Holy Carrot’s offering is not just a portobello mushroom in a white bap masquerading as dinner, either; rather, this is serious plant-based dining. If you’re a meat-eater and leave sad that there was no steak on offer, you’re a lost cause, because this is as good as it gets on my side of the leafy, cruciferous fence.

• Holy Carrot 61-63 Brushfield Street, London E1, 020-4580 1425. Open Tues-Sat, lunch noon-3.30pm (Sat 10.30am), dinner 5-11pm; Sun 10.30am-8pm. From about £50 a head à la carte, plus drinks and service