P. Franco was a natural wine bar in Clapton which closed in 2023 but was rescued by a crowdfunding campaign and reincarnated as 107 Wine Bar and Shop.
I frequented it back when it was P. Franco about nine years ago, when the gentrification of London’s East End had reached its peak. JF Ganevat’s cult oxidised Chardonnay was still affordable, and orange wine was the flavour of the month – a bottle of the good stuff would set you back £50. But it was the food that compelled me to return to P. Franco over and over again.
Tim Spedding was once chef-in-residence there, having worked at The Ledbury and The Clove Club before calling it quits to cook at this otherwise generic Clapton wine bar. The food was simple, elegant and used the best of whatever was available that season. Spedding worked with no menu, no staff and no kitchen either. He somehow managed to perform dinner service with only two induction hobs tucked in the corner of the bar. The rest of the bar counter he occupied to make fresh pasta. My memory is hazy but among the standout dishes there were endives with honey, pan fried sweetbreads and one of the best ricotta raviolis I’ve tried in London. There was an incredible lightness to his style of cooking, where even beef short ribs tasted like they were seasoned with dew from a misty spring morning. Think New Nordic-style cooking, only with actual flavour.
Tim Spedding’s food, lost to me for the better part of a decade, is still unique and I recommend everyone to try it
One day in 2017, Spedding packed up and left. He had wanted to open his own restaurant with his wife in Cornwall, where he first trained as a chef. Sometime later, I read that he and his wife Louise were working at the restaurant on Coombeshead Farm, the fabled Cornish producer of Mangalitza pork. That did not last long too, and I resigned myself to never tasting his food again.
Or so I thought. In 2024, Tim and Louise Spedding took over the New Yard Restaurant on the dreamy Trelowarren Estate, and rechristened it Flora. I simply had to go. To the Londoners who may be reading this, Trelowarren, near Helston in the Lizard Peninsula, is not somewhere one goes for a day trip into the country. The railway line to Helston was closed by Dr Beeching in 1962, and today the train only runs as far as Redruth. Even if you were to drive, as I did, it would take five hours. When my friend and I arrived on a Sunday afternoon, the picturesque barn-turned-restaurant was playing host to someone’s 90th birthday party. It was A. A. Milne, except with pensioners.
Of course it was a delight to be at Flora. It was what I imagined a posh mate’s casual garden party would look like. The dining room was bathed in natural light, and every table was set with a lit candle and a bouquet of fresh wildflowers. Stalks of fresh herbs were dropped into the carafes of tap water, probably to emphasise freshness. In the corner, the pass offered diners a glimpse into Flora’s open plan kitchen, which was well-equipped and well-staffed. The buttery, smoky aroma of dry-aged tallow filled the air.
Featherblade and short rib
Grilled green asparagus with sauce gribiche
Rhubarb and berry pavlova
The wine list was mostly natural, an Easter egg betraying the chef’s heritage – “I’ve worked in a natural wine bar.” If you know, you know. My friend and I shared a bottle of l’Octavin Pamina, a Chardonnay from the Jura rarely found on restaurant wine lists. Most of the diners around us were happily oblivious to the excellent wine selection, choosing to sip on cocktails and beers. This was the countryside after all.
Flora offered only one menu for Sunday lunch, which was served with huge railway arch-sized chunks of sourdough and Cornish butter. Bread is often listed as a course in restaurants these days, so I was pleased to see it was gratis here. I do not quite care for sourdough but this was warm and fluffy so I helped myself to another slice. The menu was handwritten by Louise on a hand-cut card in cursive script, which was a nice homemade touch but unfortunately quite hard to make out. That was probably why Tim went around the room introducing the dishes to every table.
Lunch started with a trio of starters. The first was a jalapeño pepper panisse topped with shaved Cornish gouda and lemon zest. The lemon added that trade mark Spedding lightness to an otherwise dense and concentrated chickpea chip. A quenelle of chicken liver parfait was served on a toasted slice of brioche and topped with rhubarb and orange marmalade. This tasted, and I hate myself for even saying this, like a deconstructed Heston Blumenthal Meat Fruit. No complaints there. Grilled green asparagus with sauce gribiche was the best of the lot. A sprinkling of spring herbs perfumed the dish, a reminder that we were in England, not Paris.
The main course was where it started getting a little overwhelming, not that it was the fault of the restaurant. In a moment of weakness earlier, I had half a lobster for breakfast at the UK’s most southerly pub and was not prepared for the amount of beef to be served at lunch. The first plate arrived with a grilled slice of featherblade and a mound of slow-cooked melt-in-your-mouth shortrib. Both pieces were excellent though I suspected the shortrib was designed to make diners full. Just in case that did not do the trick, a second plate arrived with the rib bone and fat trimmings. I ate all of it, along with the sides of sprouting broccoli and roasted potatoes, which were irresistible on their own.
That meant I needed fresh air before the rhubarb and berry pavlova dessert. By the time my friend and I managed to stumble out of Flora, I was on the verge of exploding. But I would go back and do it all over again. Tim Spedding’s food, lost to me for the better part of a decade, is still unique and I recommend everyone to try it. And at £55 per head the value for money was so astounding I had to check my credit card statement to remind myself how much I paid. This is a restaurant worth travelling to the southern tip of the UK for, or at least as part of a weekend trip to Cornwall.
Just don’t eat lobster for breakfast.
Stableyard Yard
Trelowarren
Mawgan
Helston
TR12 6AH
July 2025
