The stargazy pie at Dean’s—a new British-ish, pub-ish restaurant on the edge of SoHo—is, in a word, freaky. The head of a fish, cooked and glossy gray, emerges from a latticed crust, regarding the ceiling with an unnerving, dull-eyed serenity. A tail protrudes, too, at an opposite angle, giving the impression of a flexed body hidden beneath the surface of the pastry sea. (In fact, the head and tail are unconnected, and mostly decorative, intended to be removed before eating.) This wondrously bizarre dish originates in Cornwall, where the story goes that a fisherman named Tom Bawcock once braved a winter storm to bring in a catch so vast that it saved his whole village from starvation. His neighbors baked the entire haul into an enormous pie, and left the heads of the fishes poking through as a celebration of abundance, or maybe an announcement of survival. The version served at Dean’s is more modestly sized than the pie of legend, serving one or two, but under its crust, which is almost obscenely rich with butter, is a classic stargazy filling, a creamy, chowder-adjacent stew of assorted fishes and soft hunks of potato—hot and heartening, and not freaky at all.

Dean’s is the latest restaurant from Jess Shadbolt and Annie Shi, who met while Shadbolt was working at the River Café in London, and whose other New York restaurants include King, the elegant, light-filled, linen-laid restaurant with which Dean’s shares a wall. A lot of people really adore King, with its ladylike examinations of Italian and French simplicity, but I have to admit I’ve never been among them: it’s always felt a little timid, to me, a little underbaked—a kitchen interested in restraint almost to the point of absence. I do love Lei, the Chinatown wine bar that Shi opened last year, though for me its biggest virtues are the mood and the bottle list. So I was shocked by how much I adored the food at Dean’s, how walloped I felt by it. Shadbolt, who is the chef, grew up in a coastal town north of London, and Dean’s wears the inheritance plainly, in its unapologetic Britishness; its unabashed embrace of brown and beige; its self-confidently off-putting menu descriptions (“boiled ham,” forsooth!). The restaurant rewards the diner who understands that, at this kind of proudly jolie-laide establishment, there’s a secret code: the more vividly horrid-sounding a dish, the more glorious it will be. The boiled ham, for instance, is heaven: two thin slices of meat, pink as tongues, with a parsley bechamel dotted with tiny, tender favas, and a mass of rough-mashed potatoes that seemed to be nearly half butter, salted just to the ecstatic edge of overmuch.

Roast beef (left) and a chicken-free take on coronation chicken, one of Dean’s few concessions to vegetarians.

A starter of pork scratchings is likewise a stunner: absurdly long and skinny and presented upright in a silver cup, calling to mind a bouquet of long-stem roses with all their petals dropped. Slices of cold roast beef, beautiful and rare, come attended by a snowy blob of properly sinus-clearing horseradish cream, with a pickled black walnut on top like the cherry on a sundae and a crumbly wedge of cheddar. Shadbolt cleverly blitzes a bit of black walnut into a vinaigrette that dresses a spray of watercress on the side, adding an unexpected layer of harmony. There’s a wonderful green salad, a chicken-free take on coronation chicken, made of soft lettuces and celery hearts in a curry-laced yogurt dressing studded with slivers of almond and giant golden raisins; it’s a bright interlude among all those satisfying browns. It’s also, disappointingly, the menu’s only somewhat substantial meatless dish—otherwise vegetarians are pretty much limited to a bubble-and-squeak hand pie and a slice of soft bread with bitter Marmite butter. Dessert is a bit hit-or-miss: a lemon posset topped with elderflower jelly was off-puttingly grainy, but a light-as-air steamed ginger pudding—like a cake with an unbelievably soft crumb, drowning in syrup and set on a puddle of custard—was an unambiguous delight.

The room is handsome, crowded, and loud.

George Orwell wrote that his ideal pub had “the solid, comfortable ugliness of the nineteenth century”; Dean’s has neither the ugliness nor the age, but it captures something of the ease. During the daytime, broad windows let in slashes of sunshine, though I prefer the charm of later in the evening, when long tapered candles at the bar have burned down low and splutter dimly near the rim of pewter holders, lending the room a flickery warmth. Service is vivacious almost to the point of pantomime. Nearly every table seems to have at least one platter of fish and chips: a burly baton of battered hake sizzled to a medium gold, crisp and pleasing, and a handful of darkly fried fries. The space is wood-clad, sleek, and handsome—and tiny, and very crowded, and awfully loud, its ambient cacophony seeming to run without cease from the time the doors open in the late afternoon until the lights go off around midnight.

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After one of my meals at Dean’s, I marvelled to a friend about the relatively decent cost of a dinner there—a meal for two people, with eight or nine shared dishes, plus a beer and a cocktail each, came in at under three hundred dollars. My friend all but laughed in my face: it’s a pub, she scoffed. And she’s right, in the sense that pubs are supposed to be cheap absolutely, not relatively. But she’s also wrong, in the sense that Dean’s isn’t really a pub; it’s a hot downtown restaurant wearing a pub’s clothing; it’s a watering hole for the working man in much the same way that a truffle is a mushroom. The bar does a brisk run in Guinness and Old Speckled Hen, in pints and half-pints, but it also has what might be the most impressive list of English sparkling wines in the city. There’s a dartboard hanging on the wall, but the tables and bodies are packed far too tightly for anyone to get the regulation seven feet 9.25 inches away from it for any legal throw. Silverware arrives in a metal cup, four forks and four spoons and two knives, which is a pub move; so are the packages of crisps clipped up behind the bar, though they’re house-made, from parsnips rather than potatoes, and rather more fuss than function.

Cooks plating scallops, served on their shells.

Dean’s is part of a wave of restaurants—Sailor, Lord’s, Dame—that have pointedly reframed British gastronomy for a New York audience that perhaps believed too readily in the myth of English stodge. These establishments have succeeded to such an extent that a certain strain of unfussy, posh-adjacent Britishness—the proliferation of the soft-boiled egg, the Cotswoldification of the Hudson Valley—seems to be the aesthetic mode of the moment. In that sense, Shadbolt’s food doesn’t have to argue for British cooking so much as simply to practice it, excellently. The restaurant will be launching lunch eventually—with, naturally, Sunday roasts, a pub trapping as proper and totemic as malt vinegar and newsprint, or pastry with a piscine head sticking out. What was it that Oscar Wilde said? We are all in a fish chowder, but some of us are gazing at the stars. ♦

Quail Scotch eggs, and oysters served with shots of Guinness.