The Yellow Bittern

The Yellow Bittern opened in October 2024. It is run by chef Hugh Corcoran, originally from Belfast and who worked for some time in Paris at a wine bar called Delicatessen Place, before which he lived and worked as a chef for many years in the Basque country. The restaurant is named after a Gaelic poem by eighteenth century Irish poet Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Ghunna. The poem is notionally about a bird that died of thirst on a frozen lake, but is actually a defence of the poet’s own heavy drinking: rather a pub life than a lonely death. The Yellow Bittern is quirky in a number of ways. There is a minimalist one-page website, reservations are by phone or in-person only, and it only accepts cash. It opens on weekday lunches only in premises that operate as a bookshop outside of the restaurant lunch hours, and seats just eighteen guests.

The lunch offer is a set four course lunch for £50 (cheese is an optional extra course at £20), and no pesky dietary preferences are accommodated. The wine list is not written down, so you need to guess how much you are likely to spend on wine, given that only cash is accepted as payment. 

A selection from the wine cellar is written up on a blackboard. There are more wines than this, and if you ask about a specific region then the owner will bring a selection of bottles to your table to discuss. This is a somewhat unusual approach, though it would seem simpler just to write them down on a list. That being said, the bottles on offer were priced extremely fairly. We drank Fanny Sabre Les Prevolles 2021 at £90 compared to its retail price of £54, and Maison Stephan Cote Rotes Les Binardes 2019 at £90 for a bottle that retails at £80. The ones on the blackboard started at £45, though many of the descriptions were ambiguous e.g. Leon Boesch is from Alsace but produces several wines (Riesling, Gewurztraminer, Pinot Blanc, Pinot Gris, and various different vineyards within each of these categories) so “L Boesch Alsace” does not pin things down much.

Soda bread was made from scratch in the kitchen and had good texture. The meal began with a spring vegetable soup. This had a range of vegetables including asparagus, carrots, leeks and potatoes as well as mushrooms, and these were nicely cooked. The soup itself lacked flavour intensity but was seasoned accurately. This is a dish it was hard to get excited about but it was certainly competent (12/20).

This was followed by English asparagus simply cooked in butter. Again, this was an unadorned dish, but the asparagus was good quality and was carefully cooked, so it worked very well. The ingredients were allowed to speak for them themselves (14/20). Pork shoulder was presented simply, served with green salad on the side. The pork was nicely cooked and although there was no attempt at mix in the way of presentation, this was a good, hearty dish (13/20). An all-Irish cheese selection was in good condition. Rhubarb and apple tart with creme Chantilly was very good. The pastry was delicate and the acidity of the fruit cut nicely through the richness of the crème Chantilly (good 14/20). Coffee was served from a cafetière.

We had two bottles of wine and cheese so our bill was higher than it could have been. The bill came to £300 plus service and we left a £60 tip, so £360 for two i.e. £180 each. If you just stuck to the base meal and drank one of the cheaper wines then a more typical cost per person might be around £95 or so. This seems a fair enough price to me, especially given the unusually moderate wine markups. The Yellow Bittern is certainly an unusual restaurant. The food is very plain and stripped down, but the ingredients used are of good quality and the cooking was fine e.g. the asparagus was cooked precisely. It is a quirky place but the fact that all the seats were taken on this weekday lunch suggests that it has found a successful niche.