Dean’s Is Not Your Average Pub

The stargazy pie at Dean’s—a new British-ish, pub-ish restaurant on the edge of SoHo—is, in a word, freaky. The head of a fish, cooked and glossy gray, emerges from a latticed crust, regarding the ceiling with an unnerving, dull-eyed serenity. A tail protrudes, too, at an opposite angle, giving the impression of a flexed body hidden beneath the surface of the pastry sea. (In fact, the head and tail are unconnected, and mostly decorative, intended to be removed before eating.) This wondrously bizarre dish originates in Cornwall, where the story goes that a fisherman named Tom Bawcock once braved a winter storm to bring in a catch so vast that it saved his whole village from starvation. His neighbors baked the entire haul into an enormous pie, and left the heads of the fishes poking through as a celebration of abundance, or maybe an announcement of survival. The version served at Dean’s is more modestly sized than the pie of legend, serving one or two, but under its crust, which is almost obscenely rich with butter, is a classic stargazy filling, a creamy, chowder-adjacent stew of assorted fishes and soft hunks of potato—hot and heartening, and not freaky at all.

Dean’s is the latest restaurant from Jess Shadbolt and Annie Shi, who met while Shadbolt was working at the River Café in London, and whose other New York restaurants include King, the elegant, light-filled, linen-laid restaurant with which Dean’s shares a wall. A lot of people really adore King, with its ladylike examinations of Italian and French simplicity, but I have to admit I’ve never been among them: it’s always felt a little timid, to me, a little underbaked—a kitchen interested in restraint almost to the point of absence. I do love Lei, the Chinatown wine bar that Shi opened last year, though for me its biggest virtues are the mood and the bottle list. So I was shocked by how much I adored the food at Dean’s, how walloped I felt by it. Shadbolt, who is the chef, grew up in a coastal town north of London, and Dean’s wears the inheritance plainly, in its unapologetic Britishness; its unabashed embrace of brown and beige; its self-confidently off-putting menu descriptions (“boiled ham,” forsooth!). The restaurant rewards the diner who understands that, at this kind of proudly jolie-laide establishment, there’s a secret code: the more vividly horrid-sounding a dish, the more glorious it will be. The boiled ham, for instance, is heaven: two thin slices of meat, pink as tongues, with a parsley bechamel dotted with tiny, tender favas, and a mass of rough-mashed potatoes that seemed to be nearly half butter, salted just to the ecstatic edge of overmuch.