107 Wine Shop & Bar
The P. Franco room kept its sharing table, its manager and its cutlery, and Daisy Meager's rule still applies: if it is deep-fried, get it.1
Why go
Meager scored it 8.4 and opens on what did not change: It's still a tiny Clapton wine bar, shop, and excellent French-ish small plates restaurant. The single sharing table remains. The former manager remains. The cutlery is still the same.
1 The wine comes off the shop shelves and the kitchen works one chalkboard that is rewritten weekly.1 Most of the space is held for walk-ins, with a few bookable spots each night.2 Her advice for a full room is to stay anyway: Even if the handful of stools are taken, you should stick around for a glass and a lean.
1
Order this / avoid
- Order: anything fried.
The kitchen is a master of a crunchy skin and crispy crust, whether it be prawn heads to scoop aioli, skate schnitzel with an electrifying green herb sauce, or a sliver of onion on top of oysters.
1 - Order: the bread, and keep some back. Meager:
order the bread and save some to swipe earthy, rich mushroom sauce that accompanies a shattering fried chicken wing, or grassy olive oil from a plate of sausage and lentils.
1 - Avoid: turning up as a group. One sharing table and a handful of stools is the whole room.1
What locals & experts say
- Daisy Meager, The Infatuation, October 2023, scored 8.4:
when a place has perfected the atmosphere of an open-door dinner party with one of London's best wine lists, a lack of change isn't a bad thing.
1 - Meager, on how to drink here:
Have a chat with the friendly staff about what bottles are open, don't be shy if your wine knowledge extends to 'I fancy something red, and maybe a little fizzy, but isn't going to give me a raging hangover'. It's all very laissez-faire around here, so embrace it and hang about. The food is worth any wait.
1
Good to know
- Booking: most of the room is walk-in and a few spots each night can be booked. Enquiries go to hello@pipclapton.co.uk.2
- The site's history: this is the former P. Franco premises, under different ownership, with the same table and the same manager. Nothing P. Franco earned belongs here.1
- Dish detail above is from October 2023 and the chalkboard changes weekly.
Verdict
should-visit — When P. Franco closed, the room did not: the single sharing table stayed, the manager stayed, and Daisy Meager's review points out that even the cutlery is the same. What that buys you is a bottle shop where the staff open the wine at your elbow and a kitchen working off one chalkboard that changes weekly. Her steer on the food is the most useful sentence anyone has written about the place, 'If anything on the menu is deep-fried, get it', and the examples make the case: a chicken wing part-boned so it can be stuffed with ceps paste, prawn heads to scoop aioli, skate schnitzel with a green herb sauce she calls electrifying. She scored it 8.4 and calls it a dinner party you will want to come back to. It is tiny, mostly walk-in and mostly standing, which is the reason to go early and the reason it is not the top rung.