Prawn cocktail back for one month only as retro menu launches for Food Month

A menu of retro favourites including prawn cocktail and chicken kiev will be served at a top East End restaurant during London Food Month.

Chef Dave Cousin and his team at Straight + Narrow in Limehouse have created a four-course Childhood Memories menu, which he said aimed to take popular dishes associated with the Seventies and Eighties and give them a “modern, updated twist”.

It will run alongside the restaurant’s usual menu for the whole of June.

Diners who choose the £42 Childhood Memories menu will first be served “snacks” of pork, duck and chicken skin scratchings — inspired by Cousin’s favourite post-football-training treat when he was a boy.

The starter is prawn cocktail, followed by chicken kiev with smoked mash, carrots, peas and seasonal asparagus fricassee.

For dessert, jelly and ice cream will be served — a mix of custard panna cotta, strawberry jelly and ripple ice cream, topped with hundreds and thousands. On arrival at the restaurant — which opened in October and is backed by the investors behind Tom Sellers’s Michelin-starred Restaurant Story in Tooley Street — diners will receive a Pimm’s spritz cocktail.

Cousin, 36, who is based in Tottenham and trained alongside chef Paul Morgan at The Hampshire Arms in Crondall, said the Childhood Memories menu stuck to his restaurant’s ethos of “good British food done very well”. He added: “Most of the dishes on the day-to-day menu have four ingredients, but the dishes are done properly and well. That is what we are about.”

Speaking about the alternative menu, he said: “The idea came about when we saw the London Food Month opportunity. I knew it would be massive for us to be a part of it. We started off as a ‘best of British’ menu, but thought childhood would be more fun.

“At Christmas, I would go to my Nan’s house and we would have prawn cocktail as a starter, always. So we set about how to bring it up to modern standards with modern cooking techniques.”

He said chicken kiev was a favourite of his because his hard-working mother would serve it “four out of the seven nights a week as it was one of those she could just put in the oven. Everyone loves it, it is nostalgic.”

Cousin, whose debut restaurant in the capital is near Gordon Ramsay Group’s The Narrow, said he hoped that London Food Month would help to showcase less well known East End foodie areas such as Limehouse. He added: “It is great for the city. Three of the 50 best restaurants in the world are in London and it is going from strength to strength. There is every kind of cuisine in London. East London continues to go up, and it is not just in Shoreditch.”

The Childhood Memories menu will run from June 1-30 on Tuesday to Saturday evenings and must be ordered by the entire table. Four courses plus welcome drink cost £42.