CUISSON PESENTS POP-Down @ the Vaults
Bespoke dining company Cuisson has popped up again and this time they have taken residency at the Vaults in Waterloo for three months, with two floors for diners and a late night bar open until 2am. Are you a daring dining always up for a new experience? Then this is the place to be!
Cuisson offers experimental dinners, where chefs prepare dishes in the centre of the room, inviting dinners to join in and help garnish and customise your own dinners. However we’re not talking, adding ketchup to your meals, it’s more like squeezing cucumber puree onto your smoked mackerel, and yes you can actually go ahead and smoke your own mackerel!
You will be offered 4-5 courses throughout the evening. The décor of the Vaults has a low-key urban feel, with bare-bricked walls and warm candlelights, listen closely and you will also hear the trains driving across, it certainly feels secret and underground.
We were there for the launch night and it certainly was like no other dining experience, we got involved alongside the chefs garnishing our foods and tucked into the exquisite food brought to us throughout the night. Our starter was cabbage and chorizo with red pepper, lemon and pine nuts, normally cabbage wouldn’t be my first choice for a starter, but it was bursting with flavour and secretly we all thought how pleasurable cabbage would be if it was cooked like this all the time… We then tucked into Mackerel, lovage, cucumber and daikon, this was a more delicate dish, although still bursting with flavour, it was the start of stimulating our taste buds as next we were to taste what we had all been waiting for the ‘slow cooked brisket’
The brisket came with fermented vegetables alongside tea (which would be the gravy). Yes this is where we looked quite concerned… could it ruin the taste we cried? The waitress assured us we should go for it, and that we wouldn’t be disappointed. We took her advice and yes the chef experimentation had certainly pulled off the word ‘SUPERB’ It complemented the brisket very well, adding a nice light flavour, which wasn’t overpowering like some gravies can be. The brisket was tender with the right amount of crunch.
My sweet tooth thanked me after tucking into the dessert: carrot cake, coconut custard and brown butter brittle, it had the right amount of flavour and sweetness to give us a spring in our step as we left that place on a high.
If you want a dining experience with a difference then head on over to POP-Down at the Vaults!
Every Tuesday to Saturday from 7.30pm
Now until January 16th 2016
The Vaults, Leake Street, London, SE1 7NN
Tickets are priced at £39 for 4 courses and are available to purchase from: http://www.cuisson.co.uk/popdown
Written by Nyla Sammons
