In the third restaurant from the group that runs the Michelin-starred Modern European restaurant the Clove Club, in Shoreditch, and the British-Italian neo-trattoria Luca, in Clerkenwell, London has its first modern American restaurant, a 52-cover site on Kingsland Road.
Two Lights, which is led by chef Chase Lovecky, an American alumnus of Momofuku Ko, Jean-Georges, and, most recently, The Clove Club itself, is much more than a Clove Club lite. Instead, it takes cues from Momofuku and David Chang’s peripatetic style, The Clove’s own bold, offal-positive Britishness, and also elements of French classicism.
Modern American, like Modern British, is a term that indicates a style of restaurant that has deliberately and pro-actively broken from the past; innovated out of stereotype; it is a label created for a restaurant that, according to traditional rankings, is without categorisation.
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When asked to define, as best he can, what modern American cuisine is, Lovecky cites three American chefs and dishes to make his case: Wolfgang Puck’s tuna sashimi pizza, Roy Choi’s Korean tacos, and his mentor David Chang, whose Momofuku brand has changed American cuisine in the past decade — “he developed a style that’s unique” — one of the principal architects of the informalisation of fine dining in the States. “It looks simple, but there’s a lot of technique. All these different cultures amalgamate into a cuisine,” Lovecky says. “It also comes from my own travels.”
Two Lights takes its name from the National Park in Maine, New England, where Lovecky calls home. And in a city where so many new openings are derivative and without real imagination, it represents a new type of neighbourhood restaurant in an ever-improving Shoreditch, a local restaurant designed as much for the casual couple-of-glasses-of-wine-and-a-couple-of-plates crowd as it is those who want to come for a multi course sit-down dinner proper. And as if to emphasise his own love of informality and “snacking ingredients,” he says, half-jokingly, “I’m not ashamed to be eating ramen noodles in bed at midnight.”
Take a look around Two Lights, which opened last week.
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Oven-cooked skate wing with dill pickle butter
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