This article is taken from the May 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
John Newson was an early Victorian success story, the kind of man of whom Samuel Smiles would have approved. Emigrating to the capital from Suffolk in the 1840s, he began his career as a road sweeping contractor, before branching out into the manufacture of maidservants’ trunks.
A poignant product: neat, portable containers for young women’s lives, to be lugged down steep area steps or up into the servants’ eyries beneath the glistening stucco of freshly-fashionable Belgravia, an individual world encapsulated in an everyday object.
Mr Newson moved on from luggage to construction, leaving his name to Newson’s Yard, a former lumber warehouse repurposed as a chi-chi Pimlico mini-mall, where Wildflowers opened last autumn.
A collaboration between chef Aaron Potter (formerly of the superlative Elystan Street), and designer Laura Hart, Wildflowers seamlessly pulls themes from all over the Mediterranean. Its signature dish, “Holiday Potatoes” has already acquired cultish status thanks to a poetic trick which captures resonance in a similar manner to Newson’s trunks.
They’re just roast potatoes, but the “holiday” part has nothing to do with ghastly Christmas euphemisms: as our waitress explained, these crisp fluffy chunks, with just rosemary and generous salt, are named to evoke the feeling of being on the Med — the sort of thing you’d eat with a cold beer at sunset on a Catalan beach, in the blood-heat night of an Aegean taverna or maybe for breakfast on a gulet nosing down the Datça peninsula. The word contains whatever personal joys you want it to, and it works. Holiday potatoes are very good, but the happiness they produce is in the name.
Not that shortcuts are otherwise part of the Wildflowers concept. This is a very serious restaurant which manages to feel expansive and unfussy. Much of the cooking is done over coals, but the results are more polished and refined than brawnily macho.
Fried polenta with gorgonzola, speck and honey was a kind of uber-gnoccho, a glorious hit of sweet, smooth saltiness. Fennel salami was a soft but not submissive complement to the best focaccia this side of Liguria. The menu is brief but huge on vivid flavours: smaller dishes inspired by Spanish pintxos bars, moving through glamorous snacks to heftier mains, including a sharing dish of on-the-bone sirloin with bone marrow rice, paprika and lemon which positively strutted from the open kitchen.
Stuffed mussels with garlic and parsley stood out as being only averagely delicious, but everything else we tried was exceptional.
Perhaps the most skilful dish was the most apparently simple; tagliolini with just cavolo nero, olive oil and parmesan proved a disproportionately intense reminder of what good ingredients can be when not left to their own devices.
Iberico pork chop with quince, almond and gremolata was gloriously smoky and complex, happy pig in nutty marzipan. Sea bass with pumpkin, pine nuts, capers and raisins was mellow and punchy, the stickiness of the fruit taking the taste towards North Africa.
With the holiday potatoes, there wasn’t room for pudding, but we did try a wonderful not-afterthought salad in a fragrant, intriguing elderflower vinaigrette. This is complex, melodic food that requires concentration, all the more impressive for being served so breezily.
Wildflowers clearly intends to be actively welcoming, which is particularly appealing in this rather stuffy part of town. The staff have been trained in the urgency of waiting at the table for the aperitivo order, rather than drifting off and leaving one furiously clutching the menu, and the tables are elegantly spaced, which implies a pleasing confidence in the clientele: Wildflowers is not for people who need to be rammed together and deafened to have a good time.
Coffee is served on weekday mornings, and the first-floor wine bar deserves to become a neighbourhood favourite. The list focuses mainly on Italy, Spain and France, with a great choice by the glass and plenty of grown-up but not absurd bottles.
We tried a sprightly Friuliano to begin and a Sardinian “Terra e Mare” Vermentino at £56, which appropriately enough drank well with both pork and fish.
Potter’s cooking is more than convincing, but the restaurant space is slightly uneasy. The design pays much attention to texture — aged wood, plaster, muted bronze and marble effects, but what perhaps began as a decisively austere enhancement of the building’s beautiful Victorian bones seems to have lost its nerve and shoved in a few last-minute tchotchkes, a Balkan-y painted cupboard, a random wooden horse on a shelf which would be better bare. The straggly wildflowers on the tables are charming, but no more is needed — scattering a few lonely old books about feels dated and twee.
Still, you know you’re in the right place when you find yourself plotting what to eat next time before you have even asked for the bill. I like to think of Mr Newson’s ghost nodding benevolently down at Aaron Potter, a salute from one master craftsman to another.
In summer, Wildflowers expands into Newson’s Yard atrium, and I fully intend to be there, snarfing down a calamari sandwich, a steak tartare and possibly yet another holiday potato.
Wildflowers, Newson’s Yard, 57 Pimlico Road, London SW1
