Tatar Bunar, London E2: ‘No faff, no lectures. Just dinner, and lots of it’ – restaurant review | Grace Dent on restaurants

Had enough of small plates that send you home hungry? This glam new Ukrainian spot serves big portions of filling carbs

Tatar Bunar, a new Ukrainian restaurant in Shoreditch, east London, is styled as quaintly and charmingly rustic: wooden-fronted, with sage curtains, glass-panelled doors and stacks of higgledy-piggledy plates artfully arranged on shelves. Then there’s the food: sprats, potato latkes, varenyky, borscht and an abundance of wild mushrooms, and all of it influenced by chef Alex Cooper’s home town of Tatarbunary in southern Ukraine.

It’s no mean feat to take on a corner of Curtain Road just yards from the shrieking neon ballpit that is the Ballie Ballerson cocktail bar and a Simmonds “fun pub”, and somehow create Tatar Bunar’s nigh-rural ambience, or the odd sense that it’s been here since for ever. But then, Tatar Bunar is Ukrainian, so in recent years Cooper and his co-owner, Anna Andriienko, have faced down far bigger problems than tricky interior design.