Playful Grill Restaurant Peg Will Reopen With a Roaming Set Menu in Clapton

Peg, the playful East London restaurant formerly loosely inspired by Japanese grilling culture, will reopen in a new guise this Friday 17 September. The space on Clapton’s Morning Lane, which gets one of the finest golden hours in the city, will now offer a four-ish course set menu at £45, with a broader palette of influences more in keeping with the style of cooking at nearest sibling Bright.

An opening menu — subject to some last-minute changes — looks set to look like this, according to co-owner Phil Bracey:

sun sweet melon + togarashi

crystal lemon cucumber + garlic

grilled sweetcorn + fermented barley butter

pommes paillasson + mushroom duxelles

chicken tsukune, autumn truffle + egg yolk sauce

porridge bread + whey butter

cold potato noodles, seaweed + sesame

wild sea bass, turnips + lemon-onion koshō

dry-aged white park beef + glazed eggplant

optional cheese course (£9 supplement)

raspberry leaf ice cream + brambles

canelé

When it first opened in 2019, serving up yakitori-style skewers daubed with electric yuzukosho; fragrant broths of mackerel and turnip; and some very decent chicken and tofu, both fried, it was a hit. Pitched somewhere between P. Franco’s at times raucous, improvised hubbub, with place settings on shop shelves and diners jostled around the concrete table, and Bright’s expansive, high-ceilinged confidence, it borrowed from both to create a happy medium.

But come 2020 and the Covid-19 pandemic, where sibling Bright adopted a takeaway menu home to one of the sandwiches of the summer, and P. Franco became a takeaway wine shop / traiteur, Peg sat quiet for 18 months. Now, with opening chefs Byron Fini and Will Gleave joined by general manager and wine maestro Paris Bargchi, it’s hoping to follow other restaurants in the city — perhaps most notably Charlie Mellor’s Laughing Heart — and make the move from looser to tighter without losing any of the jovial atmosphere that made the diminutive space so welcoming.

Eater has contacted Peg for further detail of the opening menu; check back soon for a look inside.