Tanya Gold reviews Potato Merchant

Exmouth Market is a small collection of paved streets near the Farringdon Travelodge, which specialises in monomaniacal restaurants and has a blue plaque dedicated to the dead clown Joseph Grimaldi. We are near King’s Cross, the least magical of London’s districts, and the early summer air chokes the dying trees. There are restaurants that ‘do’ hummus, restaurants that ‘do’ sausages and now a restaurant that ‘does’ potatoes, opened, I suspect, by some mad -potato fetishists for whom I have developed something like love. It is called Potato Merchant and when I first saw it advertised I thought it was a bag of potatoes with a restaurant loitering somewhere within.

I am here because I love potatoes; sometimes I dream about them, twitch my nostrils, snore. When the early European explorers dreamed of El Dorado, did they mean the several thousand species of potatoes I imagine nestling among the Aztec ruins, seeking only a boat for England and a marketing campaign? In my head I have visited the Potato Museum in Canada, which has a 14ft fibreglass potato, with a diameter of 7ft, and is the sort of place where Humbert Humbert took Lolita.