Planque

Planque occupies two railway arches in Haggerston and describes itself, only half jokingly, as a wine drinkers’ clubhouse. There’s a genuine membership tier, around 880 pounds a year, that gets access to a deeper cellar and members only events, but the French accented restaurant and wine bar at the front is open to anyone who walks in and books, and the shop selling bottles to take home sits right alongside the dining space.

Seb Myers, Australian born, runs the kitchen, and the food is built around small, sharing friendly plates designed to sit alongside the wine rather than dominate the meal. That’s really the point of the place: the cellar is the draw, stocked with genuine rarities and natural, low intervention bottles that staff clearly know well and are happy to talk through rather than just pour, whether the budget is a house glass or something considerably rarer.

It picked up a place on the National Restaurant Awards list, ranked 97th in the UK, a reasonable marker for a wine bar that started as a slightly niche, industrial feeling proposition in an unglamorous stretch of Haggerston. The setting itself, bare brick, arch ceilings, is atmospheric without trying particularly hard to be, and the noise of trains passing overhead is part of the charm rather than a distraction.

The honest catch is that this is a wine list first, food second kind of night. Diners chasing an ambitious tasting menu should look elsewhere; what’s on offer here is well judged but supporting, built not to get in the way of what’s in the glass. Prices track with the ambition of the cellar rather than the plates, so a night here can get expensive quickly for anyone drawn to the rarer bottles.

Worth the trip out to Haggerston for genuinely knowledgeable staff and a wine list well beyond what the location suggests, less so if food is the main event you’re after.