Little Duck The Picklery
The kitchen makes the pickles, ferments and drinking vinegars in the room and sells them by the gram or the jar, so the menu moves with whatever finished this week (Square Meal).
Why go
This is the third restaurant from Tom Hill, Clare Lattin and Rory McCoy, after Ducksoup in Soho and Rawduck in Hackney, and the one where they built the fermenting kitchen into the dining room. Head chef Sara Thomson now runs the menu on Mediterranean lines against an extensive natural wine list (venue). Lacto-fermentation is the engine: salt, time and the vegetable's own bacteria, which produce lactic acid and give you sourness with none of the sharp volatility of vinegar, so a pickled walnut or a daikon kimchi can carry a plate without flattening the fish next to it. The drinking vinegars work the same argument in a glass.
Order this / avoid
- Order: chilli-cured sardines with pickled walnut, cuttlefish in ink, and the daikon kimchi, all cited in Time Out's review (Time Out). Ask what came out of the jars this week; the blackboard changes.
- Avoid: ordering like it is a normal small-plates restaurant and ignoring the shelf. The ferments are the reason the place exists and they sell them to take home.
What locals & experts say
- Time Out (4/5, Megan Carnegie):
Little Duck is beautifully low-key and serves some seriously cool combinations.
1 - Time Out on the room:
The giant marble table in the centre of this fermenting kitchen also doubles as a display area.
1 - Local rec: Jeff has it as a Time Out rec, which is the same review quoted above. REAL.
Good to know
- Timing: dinner from 5.30pm to 11pm daily. Lunch runs Wednesday to Sunday, noon to 3pm, so Monday and Tuesday are evenings only.
- Booking: take a table online; the room is small enough that walking in on a Friday is a gamble.
- Price: around £120 for two at dinner with drinks and service. Time Out's review lists a £10 lunch deal for a main and a glass of wine, worth confirming before you rely on it.
- Dietary: nothing published by the venue, so ask. The kitchen ferments and cures its own, which makes ingredient questions answerable in person.
- Location: 68 Dalston Ln, a short walk from both Dalston Junction and Dalston Kingsland.
Craft signals (kitchen: fermentation on a seasonal card, over a natural list)
Two signals. The kitchen writes the season's menu on Mediterranean lines and rebuilds it as the produce changes, with lacto-fermentation as the engine, which is a technique that only works on a card that moves: salt and time turn what is abundant now into what is on the plate in six weeks. The extensive natural wine list is the second, poured against that rather than fixed to it. A picklery with a static menu would be a contradiction in terms.
Jeff's take (his words)
- Note: "Timeout rec" REAL.
Verdict
should-visit — Make the detour if you cook. A restaurant that runs its own fermentation program, changes the menu around what is ready, and sells the jars by the gram is doing something you can learn from at the table. Time Out's 4/5 and its line about seriously cool combinations back the cooking. It stops short of a trek because the kitchen is small, the format is small plates, and no national critic has weighed in recently.