OKN1, London: ‘These students are our future’ – restaurant review

OKN1, 40 Hoxton Street, London N1 6LR (020 7613 9590). Starters £6.50-£8, main courses £11-£15, desserts £3-£6, wines from £22

Few people would describe the building at 40 Hoxton Street as a glamorous landmark, probably not even the architect’s mother. It is a block of yellow brick, with a few glacial cliffs of glass so the light can get in. There are vaguely interesting spindly design features put there, I think, to stop it looking too much like a correctional facility. It is a building with a purpose for which it is fit. So no, not a landmark. Instead, a beacon of hope.

This is the Hackney campus of New City College. Just down the road is Old Street, which is fatly stuffed with restaurants. There’s the Tramshed by Mark Hix with, in the middle, its original Damien Hirst cow in a glass box. There’s the garlanded fancies of the Clove Club with its £145-a-head tasting menu. There are Vietnamese grill houses and Korean cafés. In this bit of Shoreditch, the gutters fair run with sriracha. I say that admiringly. You can eat well and often along here.

But none of those establishments is as important as the one inside New City College. OKN1, which stands for Open Kitchen (and the postcode), is a full-service restaurant providing in-work experience alongside professionals for the students on the college’s catering and hospitality courses. The kitchen is run by chefs with experience at the likes of Dean Street Townhouse. The rest of the brigade is working their way to certificates and grades. Forgive me if I come over all Whitney Houston for a moment, but these students are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way. If that’s made you feel queasy, I can’t apologise.

The kitchen is a broad, open space, its walls pasted with pictures of what plated dishes should look like. The students are learning that a life in restaurants is not primarily about expressing your passion in the kitchen. It’s not about going on a journey, or feeling the throbbing pulse of creation’s teat in the palm of your hand as mother nature proffers up its bounty. It’s about attention to detail and nailing processes and repetition. And then doing it all again. Once you’ve got that sorted, then you can get your hands on the throbbing teat.

If you were to draw up a list of dishes you think catering students should learn, it would look very much like the menu here at OKN1. Nothing will surprise you with its inventiveness. No envelopes are being pushed. Instead what they will do is sate your appetite very nicely, with dishes which combine blessed familiarity with faultless execution and at a price that makes sense: £6.50 a starter; £12.50 a main course? Yes please.

We order their sourdough. In a city that now fetishises this bread as if it were the one true loaf, OKN1 holds its own: a crisp crust, a springy crumb and just enough acidity to remind you why the word sour is in the title without making you wince. For starters we have a perfect bit of classical training made flesh: a ham hock and chicken terrine, served at room temperature so the light glazing of jelly is starting to melt. Too often terrines end up overly compressed, by a kitchen fearful the damn thing will fall apart, when what they really need is a sharp knife to cut it. This is loosely textured, and robustly seasoned, and shiny with olive oil and cracked black pepper. It comes with thick slices of still-warm brioche and their own fig chutney, which is dark and glossy and heavy with full fruit. No, not ground-breaking, just a really good starter.

There is a salad of hot smoked salmon and baby gem, with lightly charred corn kernels, dressed with the glint of pomegranate seeds and a bold vinaigrette. We follow that with two dishes nicked wholesale from the menu at Robin’s Nest (look it up, kids): moules marinère and a chicken Kiev. Some of you will now be dreaming of simpler times when there were three TV channels. Others may think it all sounds a little too basic.

But I’d much prefer a trainee cook who can make these dishes well, over one who knows how to take a blowtorch to a mackerel or thinks partnering lamb with granola is a good idea. The mussels are big meaty numbers in a thick broth that is the blessed union of smoked bacon, slow-cooked onions and cider, invited to hang out in each other’s company for as long as it takes. The chicken Kiev is plump and crisp, and filled with a righteous basting of garlic butter. It perches on a thick lake of white bean purée punched up with Marmite butter, the closest they come to a culinary flourish.

Chips are hand-cut, hot and crisp. Green beans come under a snowfall of grated parmesan with the poke and fire of fresh red chilli. Desserts, a prosecco and raspberry, and a strawberry and citrus shortbread cheesecake, both presented in a tumbler, could be dismissed as mere creamy things in a bowl. But both come with their own bit of oven-warm baking. The posset is double-cream-thick, crusted with sugar and chocolate sprinkles, and accompanied by crisp shortbread biscuits that snap between fingers and teeth; the cheesecake cream has blitzed digestive crumb below and chopped strawberries above and on the side, night-black sugar charcoal biscuits.

There is a mildly featureless dining room inside with chairs that, like those dishes’ titles, also recall Robin’s Nest. But then this is a functional inner-city college restaurant. The key thing is that it functions very well. Tonight, however, it is empty. Instead we eat on the terrace out the back overlooking the college lawn, one of those bits of lush greenery the inner city keeps to itself, where urban foxes scamper shamelessly.

A terrine, a chicken Kiev, a cheesecake. Or instead, a salad, moules marinière and a posset. These are not menus for which trumpets will be sounded. But executed well by skilled chefs in waiting, at a fair price, they are deeply heartening. The future of the restaurant business could be in good hands. All it needs is a few more customers. If you like eating out, do your bit for the industry and go there. Trust me, it won’t be a sacrifice.

News bites

The highly regarded catering course at the Lake District’s Kendal College closed their stand-alone training restaurant, Castle Dairy, in March. They now run a service three lunchtimes and one evening a week, from within the college during termtime, starting this Tuesday. Three courses at lunch costs £13.50 and could include mushroom and chorizo soup with a chive dressing followed by spinach and ricotta roulade. The Thursday evening service costs £24. kendal.ac.uk

Starting 30 September, Parker’s Tavern in Cambridge is running a monthly series of dinners called Rubbish Cooks. The three-course menu prepared by chef Tristan Welch will utilise fruit and vegetables destined for the waste bin, alongside ‘classically disregarded parts of fish and meat’. It costs £20, which only covers service and a donation to Cambridge night shelter charity Jimmy’s. Bookings via email only at parkerstavern.com

An indication of how difficult the Home Office is making it for EU nationals in the hospitality industry to get permanent residency in the UK: high profile maître d’ Fred Sirieix was asked for proof of five years residency in the UK, despite having lived here for 27 years. He’s been appearing on British television for eight years. After outrage on social media he was granted permanent residency within 24 hours.

Jay Rayner’s book My Last Supper: One Meal, a Lifetime in the Making is published by Guardian Faber at £16.99, buy it for £11.99 at guardianbookshop.com

Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1