‘Chicken butter’ is the kind of thing you know you’re going to enjoy even before you taste it. Speaking of theatrics, we aren’t so uptight here at Just Opened to not be able to enjoy a bit of horror movie special effects, and were totally on board with these mouthfuls of razor clam coming on a bed of animated dry ice, even if the seafood itself was a little underseasoned. Attractive too were neat tubes of whipped cod’s roe, topped with dots of caviar and crème fraiche, boasting lovely fresh seafood flavours. Dainty cubes of beef tartare piled on a vegetable cracker were softly bound with mustard, and ate with an incredibly satisfying bite.

Where it matters, Handling is deadly serious, and the menu at brand-spanking-new Frog WC2 is a mature, carefully crafted tour of the finest British Isles ingredients, served in a beautiful, theatrical (literally – most tables are tilted towards the pass so you can keep an eye on what the kitchen is up to) space that invites you to appreciate to the fullest every bit of what’s offered to you.įirst of which are the ‘snacks’, faintly familiar perhaps to anyone who’s done this Modern British thing in the last few years but absolutely none the less enjoyable for that. All’s well, etc.Īnyway, these frivolous distractions are just that – distractions.

Red-faced, Coren admitted his mistake, and now they’re all great friends.

Clearly, to get this far you need talent and determination, and to be now opening another solo venture barely a year after the last opened in Spitalfields (while simultaneously planning a third due in 2018), you need a great deal of both.īut whether Handling likes it or not, users of social media are recently more likely to recognise him as the subject of a series of Instagram Stories videos by the restaurant critic Giles Coren, who ranted at great length about the rude couple in the corner of the Frog in Spitalfields working on their laptops and ignoring the lovely food they had ordered, before eventually realising it was none other than Handling himself and his wife, quietly catching up with some admin. Adam Handling’s career as a chef is notable for a number of reasons, not least his stratospheric rise from the kitchens of Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland (where he started aged just 16) to the national stage as a finalist of Masterchef: The Professionals in 2013, aged still just 25.

Masterchef the professionals adam