Diary of a Shopkeeper, 23rd March
Clapshot front and centre! Image courtesy of Bar Valette.
I received an email the other day. Not unusual – I counted my Inbox last week, and it averaged 75 a day. Yesterday I got up from my laptop to put the kettle on, and by the time I sat down again eight more emails had arrived. But this one stood out, not least because it came from a customer who always cheers us up when he comes into the shop. And also when he leaves: two for the price of one!
Peter von Eday has been in London lately, and chanced upon an Orkney culinary thumbprint in an unexpected place. One of the most fashionable new restaurants in London right now is Bar Valette in Kingsland Road. And its menu features clapshot! To be precise, clapshot croquettes. They’re £4.00 each. Whether that’s cheap or dear depends, I suppose, on how big they are. That they’re of excellent quality, the best clapshot croquettes you’ll ever taste, can be taken for granted. Elsewhere on the Valette’s menu there’s a grated carrot salad for £7.00 and a stuffed rabbit’s leg for £36.00. I don’t know what London rabbits are like, but a Stenness rabbit leg certainly wouldn’t fill you up. Which is where two or three clapshot croquettes and a grated carrot would come in useful.
Finding Orkney scallops on the menus of upscale restaurants in southern cities is common, and always gives me a warm glow. But clapshot? That’s a first. It’s a long time since I saw it on a menu here, let alone 700 miles south, in hipster-central Hackney. One reviewer described the clapshot dish as ‘Panko-fried croquettes filled with potato and suede.’ Hmm, a bit chewy…
I did some digging. The chef-patron is Isaac McHale. That name range a faint bell. Ah yes! He’s the brains behind The Clove Club, which is consistently rated as one of the best restaurants in the UK, and in some years as one of the Top 50 in the world. The Clove Club is just around the corner from Valette, in the unlikely setting of Shoreditch Town Hall. I’ve never eaten there, but I did wander about the grand Victorian building once on the pretext of examining the function rooms for hire. (My favourites were the elegant Mayor’s Parlour and an underground warren called The Ditch.) Really I wanted to peer into the restaurant with its blue-tiled open kitchen, and its row of chefs bustling away in blue and white aprons like butchers at a two-Michelin-starred chopping block.
The Clove Club menu is not for the faint-hearted: it’s £225 for their tasting menu, with matching wines another £175. Gulp. (That’s not me gulping wine, not at that price.) On the plus side, the menu does include Orkney scallops, or, to be exact ‘Orkney SCALLOP’ singular. And it’s served raw. Cue a joke about, ‘For that price you’d think they could at least have cooked it…’ Though actually, I would rather raw shellfish was expensive: I wouldn’t trust a cheap raw scallop unless the diver handed it to me over the side of the boat.
With the Orkney references stacking up, another bell tinkled in my memory. At some point I’d been browsing food and wine blogs, and come across this profile on the Identità Golose website, ‘Magazine internazionale di cuisina’:
Isaac McHale was born on the island of Orkney in Scotland. His career began very early, first working for a fishmonger, then, during high school, in a restaurant where he learnt the ropes. Once he graduated, he decided to leave home and go to London. Usually, when people leave their village they always announce it as a ‘new beginning.’ In fact it was immediately clear Isaac’s intention was that of broadening the boundaries of the Orkney islands.
Another website, The Staff Canteen, painted a slightly different picture:
Isaac McHale was born in Orkney and grew up in Glasgow. His fascination for cooking stemmed from a young age; one of his earliest food memories was eating pakora at one of the many local Indian restaurants when he was seven years old.
It seems that, though born here, Chef McHale actually spent his formative years in Glasgow: the idea of the young lad wandering from one pakora restaurant to another fits that city better than Kirkwall. Now, if he’d been wandering about eating different pattie suppers that would have been a different matter. And what is a £4 clapshot croquette but a glorified, fine-dining pattie?
You can take the chef out of Orkney, but you can’t take Orkney out of the chef.
You can see the Bar Valette menu and book a table here: https://www.barvalette.com/ If you have the clapshot croquettes, please tell us all about them in the comments below!
This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 27th March 2025. A new diary appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations, and occasional small corrections or additions.