The Horses opens in Clerkenwell with a menu of British and Irish shellfish

The Public House Group has opened The Horses in Clerkenwell this week. The new venue converts the two-hundred-year-old Coach and Horses into a dedicated dining space that places British and Irish seafood at the exact center of the room.

The interior strips away the legacy of the old journalistic drinking den and the subsequent decade of Henry Harris’s Coach. Naked plaster and heavy wood are set at a precise distance from white tablecloths and lit candles, creating a quiet geometry that forces the eye directly toward the plate.

The launch menu arranges four distinct oyster varieties—Achill, Lindisfarne, Carlingford and Jersey—alongside crab, langoustines, lobster, clams, cockles, squid and three smoked fish options. These are placed directly against the plaster and the linen, demanding a slow attention that mirrors the correspondence chess of waiting for a tide to turn.

For those who avoid the sea, the kitchen offers a potato and Wigmore pie, hispi cabbage with seaweed, chicken, onglet steak and a pork chop. The menu maintains the same rigid, unhurried structure on the plate. There is no resort to the impulse of a rushed kitchen.

This venue is the latest in a four-year-old stable that includes The Hart in Marylebone, The Hero, The Fat Badger and The Pelican. The move shifts the site away from its past as a Guardian annex when the paper relocated to King’s Cross in 2008.

The formal launch arrives on Monday 28 September, following a soft opening at reduced prices for newsletter subscribers. The full cost remains unprinted.

The distance between the naked plaster and the white tablecloth is narrow. The four oysters sit in that exact space, leaving absolutely no room for the impulse of a rushed kitchen.