In a room packed with fancy types just off Sloane Square in London, I am eating a £52 plate of dover sole and chips while Status Quo’s Rockin’ All Over the World blasts cheerfully through the room. The chips are very nice, all crunchingly crisp and yieldingly fluffy in all the right places. All 12 of them were perfect, in fact, stood aloft in their silver serving vessel. “A-giddy-up and giddy-up and get awaaaay,” sings Francis Rossi as I perch on a velvet, pale mustard banquette that’s clearly so very expensive that I shudder every time my greasy paws so much as skim close to touching it.
The Core fried chicken at Corenucopia, London SW1 is served with a side of Oasis.
Clare Smyth, of three Michelin-starred Core fame, is letting her hair down with this new project, Corenucopia, where she’s cooking a less pricey, more comfort food-focused menu. Expect seafood vol-au-vent, chicken kiev, Barnsley chop and trifle. There’s even a separate potato menu that comes to the table in its own frame, and offers pommes anna, dauphinoise, croquettes, fondant, hasselback and so on. If you order that dover sole, which, incidentally, comes battered and stuffed with lobster mousse, it turns up with its own vinegar menu, also gilt-framed. Balsamic? Barrel-aged sherry? Champagne? “Malt, please,” I said, aware that this was the request of a drab traditionalist.
But, while Corenucopia’s decor is determinedly posh, its soundtrack pounds with British dad rock, ranging from the aforementioned Quo to Oasis to Clapton to the Stones. If that sounds a bit confused, well, fans of Core seem to be remarkably clear on the matter, because Smyth’s new joint is currently jam-packed with Michelin-chasing types dying to try her new, relaxed, groovy, “pocket-friendly” outpost. Still, while Core costs £265 per person before wine and service for the seven-course “Seasons” tasting menu, Corenucopia offers starters such as a crispy veal sweetbread for £32 followed by turbot with vin jaune sauce for £64, and desserts such as a profiterole (singular) with Tahitian vanilla cream filling at £22. Add a fig leaf or mezcal negroni, a splurge off the spud list, a glass or two of wine with the savoury courses, followed by a 2010 Château Suduiraut sauternes to go with your profiterole, and you might as well have gone to Core.
‘A plump little treasure trove’: Corenucopia’s mushroom pie.
Even so, the food at Corenucopia is a delight. This is cosseting, decadent, calories-be-damned cooking. Grilled olives on skewers with eel and timut pepper? Absolute bliss. An ornate smoked salmon paté topped with dill jelly and served with mini buttered crumpets? Wonderful. The same goes for the pithivier-style mushroom pie filled with ceps, portobello, parmesan, spinach and smoked egg yolk – a plump little treasure trove that I ate with some crisp brassicas enlivened with horseradish, parmesan and lemon. The hasselback potatoes cooked in beef fat were a joy, too, though at £8.50 plus service, to serve just three of them seemed more than a tad ungenerous. That battered dover sole with the lobster mousse, meanwhile, is more than mere gimmick, and comes with very good, earthy crushed minted peas alongside those triple-cooked chips.
For pudding, we went for the sherry trifle made with Bristol cream and red berries that came topped with whipped cream, but it lacked the stodge and heft of a true sherry trifle, and was more a bowl of light, jammy cream. In fact, I regret not opting for the sticky toffee pudding made with rum and treacle and served with jersey cream, or for Smyth’s spin on tiramisu, an “Irish-misu” made with Jameson’s-fuelled Irish coffee.
The sherry trifle at Corenucopia is ‘more a bowl of light, jammy cream’.
Obviously, Smyth is not the first highfalutin chef to open a relaxed restaurant. Gordon Ramsay perfected that move decades ago, making his name with the hyper-expensive and très exclusive Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, where Smyth herself first came to attention, before broadening his reach with numerous less stuffy ventures. So much so that, by 2026, people with bumbags are now queueing for his Pub & Grill at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Corenucopia is many, many steps back from the likes of that, not least because it is still in a Michelin-adjacent Chelsea bistro with red-trousered guests and a chunky wine list. Even if Liam Gallagher is gargling through Supersonic as you’re eating fried chicken with caviar, you’re still not putting elbows on tables.
Service-wise, meanwhile, there is a strong sense that any front-of-house person who begins by calling the diners “folks”, or squatting by the table to take their order, or tries to do so without a pen and paper, would be taken outside and shot. Does lobster bisque thermidor actually need the Riverboat Song by Ocean Colour Scene as its soundtrack? No. Do you have any allergies, madam? Yes, Britpop.
Corenucopia by Clare Smyth 18-22 Holbein Place, London SW1, 020-8016 5752. Open lunch Fri-Sat, noon-2.30pm, Sun 12.30-3.30pm. Dinner Weds-Sat, 6.30-9.30pm, Sun 6-9pm. From about £80 a head à la carte, plus drinks & service