Marrion’s, a new solo venture from Norman’s Café co-founder Elliott Kaye, is a relaxed neighbourhood restaurant in Hackney that makes sense, with most plates around the £12 mark.
The restaurant is located at 177 Morning Lane, E9, and costs about £70 a head. It bills itself as a cocktail-led fusion restaurant, with a small hole in the wall behind the bar leading to the kitchen. The two pre-opening pillars were “relaxed neighbourhood restaurant” and “unfussy”, both starkly accurate on arrival.
French bistro meets American diner
Marrion’s chooses French bistro and American diner, a pairing that feels more plausible than many fusion concepts. Dishes include coppa ham with pickled green chillies, moules-frites, crab toast, tuna melt, schnitzel Holstein and a cheeseburger.
The crab toast arrives with mature cheese and a Worcestershire kick, with the cheese matching the dark crab in loud stature. The moules-frites are as they should be, which is faint praise until you consider how many restaurants have found new ways to interfere with them.
Restraint and repetition
Kaye cooks solo, with no ticket rail; instead, five salt shakers sit on top of the paper orders to stop them wandering off. The tuna melt is perhaps the dish that best explains what Marrion’s is trying to do, with Monterey jack cheese peeping through the top lip and a large half log of pickle pinned with a toothpick.
The cheeseburger falls into the camp of foods that mainly require somebody to know when to stop, and can best be described as how an elderly Parisian would tart up a Big Mac. Restraint matters because Marrion’s could so easily have become a restaurant about its own concept. Instead, it is casual enough not to feel performed, but serious enough to return to, with prices that permit repetition.
