Electric Feel

Elektra’s pan-European approach is a shift in the right direction

- Michael Harden

Let’s start with Elektra’s potato and tarama snack. A contender for a place on any best bar- snack listicle, this two-bite number sees Royal Blue potatoes cooked in butter, pressed and then sectioned into batons that are deep-fried, sprinkled with salt-and-vinegar powder and topped with taramasalata, ouzo-washed trout roe and fresh dill. It’s ridiculously good, hitting all the right salty, fishy, deep-fried pleasure spots. It’s also a snapshot of Elektra’s DNA.

The potato snack is based on a dish from the dégustation-only menu at Elektra’s predecessor The Press Club, George Calombaris’s modern Greek flagship that closed in June after 12 years, one of the less-fraught reasons to have kept Calombaris in the spotlight recently.

At The Press Club, the carb part of the dish was savoury loukoumades, rather than the fancy hash brown being dished up by executive chef Reuben Davis. The Elektra version not only points to a shift in direction from Greek to a wider pan European approach but also to two other significant differences: Calombaris ceding direction of the menu to Davis and a transformation from slightly over-thought fine-diner to a more relaxed and affordable eatery with an urbane restaurant-bar vibe.