The Blue Stoops, London: ‘It’s all about the details’ – restaurant review
Share:
Kensington’s Blue Stoops looks like a pub and thinks like a pub – so it must be a pub. The Blue Stoops, 127-129 Kensington Church Street, London W8 7LP. Bar snacks £4-£12, starters £6-£15, mains £19-£26, desserts £10-£12, wines from £38. There are many who believe a true pork scratching should be a challenging affair; that you should stumble across the odd one so rich in bristles you don’t know whether to eat it or comb it. There should be others that present an invitation to suckle. The pork scratchings at the Blue Stoops in Kensington are, like the street it occupies, rather more refined. No deep-fried nipples here. The pig skin has been scraped of fat, simmered then dehydrated, before being puffed up on service to a hand’s length in the deep fat fryer. They arrive, salt and chilli-dusted and still warm, tucked into a beer glass, looking like some creamy-coloured mineral accretion dug out of a cave. They have crunch and a pleasing collagen stickiness and are more like a Mexican chicharrón than a friendly tooth-destroyer from the Black Country.
![[Jay Rayner]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2018/01/11/Jay_Rayner,_L.png?width=75&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
The political wing of the Pub Liberation Front, an entirely fictitious but believable organisation representing the chapped-lipped outrage of those who don’t hold with pubs being places where you can eat too well, might like to add these so-called scratchings to the charge sheet. They may, however, find it tricky to make a case against the Blue Stoops. This is an old pub location, newly renamed after the long-gone 18th-century birthplace of the Allsopp’s brewery in Burton-on-Trent, a town regarded as the home of British brewing. Accordingly, in the saloon bar they have a range of cask ales, including Allsopp’s Best Bitter at £5.50 a pint, and their IPA at £6.50.
![[‘Tastes like Marseilles smells when the breeze is coming in off the sea’: cuttle fish stew.]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/5846a75bee9ab5f7f0abc54e25bd7a3a2f72dfe8/0_125_5616_3370/master/5616.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
