Roe in Canary Wharf is an absolute beast of a venue: 500 covers, with a terrace, private dining, a capacious main area split into three defined areas, and a sit-up counter. Mind you, there is room for a restaurant to spread its legs in London E14. The newish Hawksmoor just along the wharf is also enormous, while the nearby Dishoom is another behemoth with added bacon naan.
Roe is the second incarnation of the much-loved Fallow in St James’, which is known for its peculiar, yet ultimately delicious nose-to-tail, cheek-to-bumhole, low-intervention-style menu. Fallow, at least to begin with, had about it a rather worthy, Greta Thunberg with a Leith’s diploma vibe that sent a certain type of foodie giddy with joy. Fallow’s signature dish is a cod’s head doused in sriracha butter, and its beady eye glowers at you while you eat your kombu fries. In fact, I’ve felt a bit like Hamlet in high heels every time I’ve eaten there. Alas, poor Coddy, I knew him.
New kid Roe, however, is a bigger, slicker, marginally less edgy version of Fallow, probably because E14 is the beating heart of the UK’s financial world and the audience round here doesn’t care if you’re trying to save Mother Earth one repurposed dairy cow called Hilda at a time. City people just need the burger, which at Roe contains both beef and venison, to be delicious. They also want their steaks to be 35-day, dry-aged and with XO mushroom sauce, plus a deep-fried blooming onion smothered in garlic mayo on the side. Oh, and a big slab of Tunworth cheesecake for afters. Massive, assertive flavours in a hulking football pitch of a restaurant.
Did I mention that the place has 500 covers? This is a restaurant for people who like other people. A misanthrope invited to Roe would probably need to be struck down by a diplomatic dose of chickenpox. But while the place is far from intimate, the food sent out from the heavily populated open kitchen is made with true geeky precision. The menu screams “crowdpleasers cooked as you’ve never seen them before”. There’s a baked potato dish that I vow to eat again and again every time I return; it’s a baked, buttery spud in a bowl of rich cheese sauce, topped with shoestring fries and dotted with sweet, brown kombu ketchup. There’s a hen of the woods burger for vegetarians, featuring a brioche bun filled with a decadent, deep-fried mushroom patty, cheese, lettuce and shallot. Pillowy flatbreads come with various toppings – posh pizzas, if you like, though these salty, oil-drizzled, slightly charred breads come with scallops and bacon butter and the rather terrifying-sounding “snail vindaloo” with mint yoghurt.
Roe’s menu dances rather daintily and deftly between “pub grub”, “fever dream” and “Noma”. Octopus and sausage skewers with samphire and sea bream tartare with tiger milk sit alongside a Cornish pasty and a side of salt and pepper fries for anyone who finds haute cuisine a bit daunting. The place is kind of mad, but it’s also mass-market and, ergo, sheer bloody genius. And if you’re wondering if they’ll have space for you and your friends, the answer is a resounding yes, because, as I’ve already said, Roe is bigger than some former Soviet-era Russian states.
Right now, I really can’t think of a nicer informal lunch than Roe’s spring vegetable, ricotta and mint flatbread with a round of lemon verbena swizzles or gooseberry daiquiris off the cocktail list, and especially not if it could be taken on the outdoor terrace. For a larger table, you wouldn’t go far wrong by also ordering the very good satay chicken wing skewers, a couple of bowls of the pretty breaded mushrooms with a fierce aïoli and the house-made charcuterie plate with cornichons. We ate indoors at a lovely, spacious table with plenty of elbow room, and ordered a beautifully dressed sea bream tartare arranged delicately with apple and radish, that spring flatbread loaded high with asparagus, the jacket spud dish, fresh peas and ricotta, an Isle of Wight tomato salad and the mushroom burger, which eventually defeated me.
Even so, Roe’s dessert menu is, I regret to say, unavoidable. They make a posh Vienetta with mint ice-cream, chocolate and marigold, though, unlike the “bad”, factory-made Vienetta that you needed a bread knife to cut, Roe’s version is delicate, luxurious and tastes of fresh mint. It’s well worth a whirl, though personally I’d go back for the caramelised banana parfait with nutty toffee sauce. It’s a sort-of-heavenly deconstructed banoffee pie complete with a clever optical illusion, though I won’t spoil that surprise for you.
Nobody ever had Canary Wharf down as a future restaurant hotspot, but now Roe has come along to join the growing crowd and prove that a restaurant can be big as well as clever.
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Roe 5 Park Drive, Wood Wharf, London E14, info@roerestaurant.co.uk(no phone) Open all week, noon-10.30pm. From about £50 a head à la carte, plus drinks and service
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This article was edited on May 31 2024, to correct a homophone – an earlier version referred to the “Isle of White”, when that should have read “Isle of Wight”.