Finding its feet? No, this place is already dancing

TO do this job is to generally encounter restaurants in the bum-fluffed early phase of their hopefully long lives.

- Jimi Famurewa

The dining rooms are marked by thin crowds, puppyish servers, or the intangible, atmospheric stiffness of formal shoes that haven’t been properly broken in. There is, in the daytime, almost always at least one table of operational staff tapping at laptops and trying not to visibly mouth a swear word as they spot my big, grinning mug ambling in.

But at Morchella in Exmouth Market, on only the second evening of official trading from founders Ben Marks and Matt Emmerson, things could scarcely have been more different. Here, in the double-height interior of a former bank, were lived-in accents; here were staff with the assuredness, wit and finely-grooved choreography of 10-year veterans; here were hordes of excited diners, all borne by a clamorous, undulating wave of gossip and laughter.

And here, after just a week of hotticket soft launch meals, was the creeping feeling that I’d apparently been scooped by half the restaurant obsessives in London. There are a number of ways to parse this unusual early hysteria. One is that it is a mark of the turbo-charged ridiculousness of modern dining’s hype cycle; another is that it is purely a reflection of the popularity of Perilla, the ruggedly elegant, Newington Green spot that is Marks and Emmerson’s other acclaimed business.