The Plimsoll in Finsbury Park

THE Plimsoll is an odd name for a pub but makes for a great quiz question. The plimsoll line – in case you wondered – refers to the line marked on the hull of cargo ships to indicate the maximum weight and depth to which it may be safely loaded.

The inventor, Samuel Plimsoll, lived in the street in Finsbury Park that now bears his name and is home to one of the most fashionable pubs in north London.

The Plimsoll is a genius hybrid of old-school boozer and a must-book-ahead gastropub. The atmosphere and décor is more of the former – but the food is often sensational.

The pub has been packed ever since it opened a few years ago on the back of a crowdfunding campaign to knock it into shape. The owners had previously run a cult pop-up at The Compton Arms in Islington and this was the first place of their own.

I love the interior. They made the decision to keep much of the spirit of this building’s previous incarnation as The Auld Triangle, a slightly fading Irish pub.

On one side is the bar, which still serves a good pint of Guinness but now has a dangling glitterball on the ceiling. The other half is home to a small open-plan kitchen, the extractor decorated with a collection of fridge magnets.

The wood panelling is still intact, along with wallpaper in a nicotine tint of yellow – now hung with an eclectic smattering of framed pictures of sailing boats, kittens and other ephemera. We sat in the dining room, lit by candles stuffed into wax-encrusted glass bottles.

The food menu follows the abrupt modern formula of listing two or three ingredients on a scrap of paper: “CHOUX, BANANA, CHOCOLATE” or “PORK PIE, PICKLES”.

Everything we ate was terrific. We dug into a bowl of skin-on, deep-fried salad potatoes bathed in a pungent aioli (£5).

For our five-a-day, it was a salad of bitter, scarlet radicchio leaves with florets of cooked cauliflower and a grating of Comté cheese (£12).

Other options included cockles with cured ham or ricotta ravioli with a pigeon ragu.

But it’s impossible to resist their cheeseburger, rated as one of the best in the capital. It’s sloppy, glossy and perfectly balanced with the zing of gherkins cutting through the oozy cheese and patty of charred Dexter beef.

The service on our visit was good, but I imagine it can get rather chaotic in here given how busy this pub has become.

An Instagram post refers to the “organised chaos” of The Plimsoll, which is part of its charm, and their “unique take on pub culture”. It worked like a dream for me.

Plimsoll shoes, by the way, are part of this story: their name comes from the line of the rubber sole where it joins the shoe fabric – which resembles the line on the ships.

The Plimsoll
52 St Thomas’s Road, N4
02030341099
Info@theplimsoll.com
Instagram: @the.plimsoll