Mallow Restaurant, Canary Wharf

A vexing vegan restaurant in the greyest of locations.

If anyone invites you to Canary Wharf, don’t go. Under any circumstances.
Make any excuse necessary.
The dog has contracted rabies; your mother in-law has moved in and possibly given the dog rabies; you have to feed the goldfish as they don’t look well and are showing signs of rabies; anything… just don’t go.

The City of London lays claim to some of the most astonishing buildings in the world, St Paul’s Cathedral, the Tate Modern, St Pancras Station and the Shard. Each one, an iconic and magnificent landmark.
And there is the Canary Wharf. What was once a hive of activity, a buzzy 19th century port where spices and sugar were delivered from the Canary Islands is now a sad, sterile, soulless steel ghetto, populated by sad, sterile, soulless financiers and tech incels; an oppressive maze of monotonally metallic boxes housing private equity types who have a load of equity, but little complexity.

Who can we thank for this glorious faux Manhattan abomination?
The Iron Lady. Who else?
The tin eared matron of misery transformed the area from a wasteland of derelict warehouses to a wasteland of derelict skyscrapers. The Canadian building tycoon Paul Reichmann convinced Thatcher to provide some large tax concessions, he was bankrupted, but the development was completed in the mid nineties, and all the major banks and financial institutions moved in. Fast forward to 2025, and the gleaming steely grey prison cells are half empty, the credit rating company, Moodys have downgraded the owners, The Canary Wharf Group, to the lowest investment grade rating of Ba3. Moodys, along with HSBC and others promptly left their Canary Wharf tenancies like rats up a drainpipe and headed for the hills, aka Central London.

As we wander up the stairs from the tube station, the towering metal and glass structures cast fifty shades of grey, the ominous reflection renders the few passersby with the pallid complexion of a kidney donor patient. The place is so very, very gloomy and bereft of life that not even the imposing rainbow coloured double dildo art installation can excite this weeping urban ulcer . We meander past the token skate park, the one that is purpose built for the thousands of gnarly cool skateboarders who I am sure are going to arrive any minute; on the tube from Dalston. I am walking through a zombie Gen Z apocalypse, it’s a scene from the film, ‘A Quiet Place 2’, where smiling rather than making a sound may result in annihilation.

We pass the usual restaurant suspects; the capable canaries sent down this gaudy gold mine, all of whom have been lured here by raffish developer’s promises of thousands of captured residents and office workers spending vast sums of money they don’t have. Hawksmoor, The Ivy, Dishoom, Eggslut, Gaucho are all empty, apart from the captive floor staff whose distressed faces are hard pressed against the windows, pleading to be rescued; or, at the very least, be allowed to serve someone.
Anyone.
A few minutes later we join our two friends at Mallow restaurant. The restaurant group that owns Mallow, specialise in vegan, plant only restaurants, including a Mallow in the Borough Market, as well as six other venues dotted around central London called Mildreds. The large space is an elaborate parade of curved muted fuchsia walls, a multitude of Middle Eastern inspired lantern light fittings and a ceiling that is reminiscent of a painter’s palette. The designer has been given a trade discount at the newly opened IKEA store in Marrakech and spent big.

The brunch phenomenon seems to have only just hit London, but the four of us decide to skip the brunch section and head straight to the more savoury lunch section of the menu. The only other table of diners in the restaurant are tucking into something that looks like pancakes and what the menu describes as “Kim chi croque,” a hybrid sandwich of dubious Korean and French origin featuring brioche, Kim chi, gochugaru bechamel and gochujang sweet chilli sauce. It looks worse than it sounds.

This irritating narrative of trying to retro fit vegan ingredients into classic non vegan dishes continues throughout the whole menu. Who really wants to order the ‘Full English ‘breakfast with scrambled tofu? What does plant-based blood sausage taste like? I will never know.

There are lukewarm croquettes with an oozing beige hue, the filling has a vague, boggy mushroom flavour; the deep-fried orbs sit innocently in a blood splattered crime scene of saccharinely sweet plum ketchup and regret. Panfried dumplings are excellent, the four gyozas are filled with cabbage, peas and carrots, adorned with green chilli oil, shallots and a ginger teriyaki dipping sauce.

A ‘courgette samphire carpaccio’ is restaurant grifter language to try to convince you to spend £9 on a bowl of food that my dog would send back. The raw, bland zucchini ribbons are tossed with wet flaccid samphire and blobs of imitation mascarpone that taste like coagulated llama sperm; there is no seasoning other than precious little zaatar, lemon juice and thought.

The four of us are all still ravenous and we fight over the delicious tiny Rubic cubes of golden fried potato that sit on an aromatic sauce of cashew nuts and red peppers. The bourgeois flat bread is undercooked, flabby and tastes like charred plasticine and can’t be saved by the ‘tempered’ curry leaf oil.

The dish that restores some faith is a large plate of Muhammara Borek. A coil of baked filo pastry filled with smoky eggplant and walnuts, sits on a creamy pool of saffron tahini; the slight bitterness of the saffron is balanced with a hint of sweetness from the marmalade glaze on the pastry. First rate cooking.

We add a side order of excellent lemon pepper fries and a bowl of what is advertised as carrot daikon Kim chi. There is no salty flavour, no fermented funkiness, no heat, no sour tanginess. Kim chi for rich white people who don’t like the flavour of Kim chi; just a tired bowl of vegetables that have sat under the heat lamp for days.

The veganising of classic desserts begins with a half decent crème brûlée made from nut milk with apricots and a lemon brandy snap. The raspberry tart is the sort of thing you would buy at a fete simply because you felt sorry for the forlorn old lady behind the table. The pistachio pastry crust has the tensile strength of a double brick wall and requires a steak knife to cut through it to reach the inspissated raspberry turd; the menu describes it as curd.

A stodgy chikki toffee pudding can’t be saved by it’s Indian cultural appropriation or the pimped up peanut sesame fennel praline (I am exhausted just typing that).

I enjoy dining at vegan restaurants and London has some excellent establishments; the Middle Eastern inspired Bubala and the Japanese Itadaki Zen in Kings Cross are two such places.

However, I can’t add Mallow to that recommended list, the overwrought plates of food are eminently instagrammable but manifestly inedible. The menu is a bastardisation of classic dishes whose elements have simply been substituted with vegan ingredients; add a Korean flourish, an Italian dish here, and an Indian term there, and the end result feels like an opportunistic plant-based money grab that has no culinary credibility or coherency.

Diners deserve better. Even the ones incarcerated in this dystopian hamlet of desolation.

Mallow Restaurant, Canary Wharf, London, UK
https://mallowlondon.com/locations/