Roe

Cuttlefish toast at the open pass

The toast leaves the pass with cuttlefish, pork skin and sesame at Roe in Canary Wharf, London, a kitchen built for reach as much as finesse. Roe opened in spring 2024 in Wood Wharf, Canary Wharf, as the expansion of the team behind Fallow in St James’s and FOWL, with chefs Jack Croft and Will Murray shaping the culinary language. The two met working at Heston Blumenthal’s Dinner by Heston and took on a vast empty shell here with no grand plan, starting from almost nothing and building the concept out over post-shift conversations. The result seats 500, which is an unusual scale for a restaurant whose whole method depends on handwork.

Their stated position is a refusal of the preachy version of sustainability. The cooking is meant to be bold and crowd-pleasing, with the environmental thinking built into sourcing and in-house preparation rather than delivered as a tableside lecture. In a district previously served mostly by corporate steakhouses, that combination has made the address a destination rather than an after-work default.

Small plates built for a large room

Roe’s method sits in the tension between a sharing table and a high-volume pass. The menu moves by sections rather than ceremony: snacks, small plates, grilled skewers, Wildfarmed flatbreads, larger plates, grill and sides. Cuttlefish toast carries the memory of prawn toast but turns it through a different texture, with pork skin and sesame doing the work of crackle and fat. Sriracha mussels bring heat to shellfish; pork belly skewers take Thai chilli and yakitori glaze to the grill; snail vindaloo flatbread folds spice into bread rather than treating it as garnish. The black peppercorn chips are not there for quietness. They take their place beside market fish, oysters, mushroom parfait, Devon crab and mixed grill dishes, giving the table several registers at once. Sustainability sits inside the cooking rather than beside it, through seafood choices, local sourcing and the Fallow habit of in-house seasoning and sauces.

Marine tones, marble tables, open fire

The room keeps to cool marine tones, clean edges and pools of lamplight. Marble tables give the plates a hard, pale surface; the open kitchen gives the room its motion. This is not a hushed dining room, and it is not trying to be one. The sound rises because the format asks people to pass dishes, compare heat, pull at flatbread and decide whether the next skewer belongs in the centre of the table or at one place. Around the edge, the wrap-around terrace looks over South Dock, giving the scale of the restaurant a reason beyond capacity. Inside, the counter and pass keep the craft visible, so the work reads in gestures: a skewer turned, toast cut, mussels flamed, chips seasoned, a plate checked before it leaves for the room.

Why the scale matters

Roe is an unusually large test of a small-plates idea. The team took a vast Wood Wharf shell and made a restaurant that still depends on handwork, sequencing and appetite rather than a single set menu, with slick operations and dishes visual enough to travel online. That is the discipline to follow here: whether the kitchen can keep the edge of its cuttlefish toast, sriracha mussels and snail vindaloo flatbread while 500 seats fill around it.