Jimi Famurewa reviews Sune: Finally a wine bar breaking the Hackney formula

Charlie Sims and Honey Spencer's project is something of an antidote to “chef-led” pretentiousness, says Jimi Famurewa
No pretence: the dining room
Adrian Lourie
Jimi Famurewa @jimfam24 January 2024

“Wine-led sharing-plates restaurant”. They are innocuous, omnipresent words, but they can cause even the most determinedly optimistic of diners to emit a low groan and pinch the bridge of their noses like weary TV detectives. Because you can see it all already, can’t you? You can see the little dish of Gordal olives and the neat shoal of Cantabrian anchovies adrift in a pool of golden oil; you can see the back-troubling bar stools cast in flickering candlelight and the rows of irreverently labelled skin-contact wines called things like Juicy Bastard. It can feel like a kind of human-initiated AI; a digitally flattened, copycat environment where, from Malmö to Melbourne, restaurateurs of a certain age are all endlessly extrapolating on the same half-a-dozen previously successful ideas and motifs.

However, at Sune — a new Broadway Market spot from married hospitality veterans Honey Spencer and Charlie Sims, plus head chef Michael Robins — they have taken this potentially hackneyed (and undoubtedly Hackneyed) premise and done something truly noteworthy with it. Partly it is the atmosphere, the detail and the welcome — the fact that Spencer and Sims have taken some of the rigorous, gently clairvoyant service principles of the restaurants on their illustrious combined CV (Noma, Lyles, Mãos) and transposed them to a soaring little, sun-flooded room beside the Regent’s Canal. But mostly, though, Sune (which is pronounced “sooner” and comes from the Old Nordic word for son) is a project conceived as something of an antidote to “chef-led” pretentiousness.

The dairy beef tartare croque monsieur
Adrian Lourie

It is the food here that is most likely to sink its hooks into you. This begins with the dish that is already emerging as an unconventional signature. It is a dairy beef tartare croque monsieur: a decorous miniature ham toastie, enrobed in a golden spill of melted cheese, piled with a glistening, thick-chunked heaping of raw meat and packing a delirious, messy tussle of bovine funk, piercing brine and mellowing, lactic sweetness. Next came an expanse of eel Caesar salad that landed as one crashing wave of moreish umami after another; Bible-thick, griddled pork chop in a sweet, ringing prawn stock and lemongrass sauce; bonfire-scented shredded cabbage, brightened by a lime, white soy and tarragon dressing. And before all that, there was a robustly grilled, profoundly flavoursome flatbread, alongside a horseradish and trout roe cream, that ploughed the same furrow of studious intensity.

The pork chop
Adrian Lourie

As you’d expect, this ambitious thoughtfulness extends to the drinks compiled by Spencer. It is an all-natural wine list but one that leans on Old World refinement and features the increasing rarity of a sub-30 quid bottle of house stuff. A dryish January meant I wasn’t boozing (we flashback here to explanatory footage of your correspondent drinking a harbour’s worth of local beer on a recent trip to Sydney), so the presence of an effervescent, kombucha-ish number from Danish “nolo” distiller Muri was both much appreciated and spoke to Sune’s general willingness to go the extra mile.

Were there snags? That pork chop (always a far more unforgiving cut than its ubiquity suggests) perhaps wanted for some succulence. Plus a few of the tables in the room are wedged in so tightly that there’ll be a degree of non-negotiable intimacy with the sidling backsides of your fellow diners. These are all signs that, though Sune is clearly in a hurry to grow — Sims and Spencer are plotting a canalside terrace and a seafood-heavy Sunday brunch — it is also very much a new business that is taking shape.

It works because it is built upon diligence, enlivening novelty and the sort of vivid flavours that make you want to howl in delight

Sune deals in measured hits of palate-jolting unexpectedness; it proffers the sexy, tactile thrill of miniature sandwiches, spilled martinis and slatternly sauces dribbled onto eager fingers. Yes, there is an unassuming, breezy familiarity at its core. But the reason that it all works is because it is built upon diligence, enlivening novelty and the sort of vivid flavours that make you want to howl in delight. What you experience here, really, is the team’s good taste, judgment and fun-seeking spirit. It is tremendously good news for Hackney, and for London at large, that they have committed so wholeheartedly to sharing it with the rest of us.

129A Pritchard’s Road, E2 9AP. Meal for two plus drinks about £140. Open Wednesday to Thursday from 5.30pm-10pm and Saturday to Sunday from noon-10pm; sune.restaurant

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