Acme Fire Cult, Abbot Avenue, London E8 3DP. Snacks and small plates £3-£9, massive plates £14-£24, dessert £6, wines from £31, beers £5-£6
When cooks Andrew Clarke and Daniel Watkins introduced their newest enterprise collectively, in London’s Dalston, it was described as: “Greater than only a restaurant.” Actually? What’s it then? An amusement park? A fetish membership? A department of Ikea? A type of may show helpful. “It’s a cult.” Oh my. In equity, should you have been looking for a London prepare dinner to go up a raging, devoted non secular motion, Clarke would match the invoice. He has a foot-long beard that may home small mammals or be plaited into viable rope, and so many tattoos that he’s change into a strolling secular challenger to the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
Or maybe not. Whereas he may make an excellent figurehead, I do know him to be a considerate chap, who most likely wouldn’t be comfy with all of the coercive management a real cult calls for. He has been concerned with vital tasks tackling psychological well being points in and across the hospitality enterprise, and has talked in a compelling approach about his personal challenges.
So take the bombast of the title Acme Fire Cult with a pinch of high quality, artisanal sea salt. It actually isn’t greater than a restaurant. There are tables and chairs, each within the purposeful eating room and on the rugged deck exterior, the place warmth lamps dangle. There are menus and waiters. You order and so they convey, from the wood-fired grill exterior, their solely kitchen. It’s an fascinating growth within the live-fire cookery motion, which Clarke helped popularise via the a lot glossier St Leonard’s restaurant he ran with Jackson Boxer in Shoreditch. For apparent causes to do with the caveman imagery of burning logs and woolly mammoths, reside hearth cookery has associations with hunks of meat. When you have the time, it may be a great way to prepare dinner the cheaper cuts from corners of the animal that, having labored more durable, have extra connective tissue, and wish longer to interrupt down.
There may be a few of that on this menu, developed throughout a collection of pop-ups over the previous couple of years. For probably the most half, nevertheless, it’s thrillingly, impressively vegetable led, a part of a self-declared dedication to get away from the entire “dude meals” tradition round hearth and smoke. Because of this, I would like it to be a lot greater than a cult, as a result of cults are inclined to implode shortly beneath the burden of their very own filthy impropriety. This must endure. Acme can also be a collaboration with 40ft Brewery with whom they share an area, in a tough outdated yard subsequent to the Dusty Knuckle Bakery, the wellspring for a lot of north London’s overly developed sourdough behavior. The brewery doesn’t simply present beers to go together with the meals. By-products from brewing, comparable to yeast and spent grains, are used to make ferments and sauces.
To date, so achingly “grim up north London”, for the Non-public Eye readers amongst you. Assertion of the plain: none of this may be vital if the meals wasn’t good. A fantastic beard, tats and leaping flames don’t dinner make. Fortunately, a lot of it’s good. We begin with their devilled eggs. Mary Berry would, I feel, give these a basilisk stare. The normal Sixties stalwart concerned the boiled eggs being halved, the yolks eliminated, combined with mayo and cayenne pepper and so forth, whipped and returned. Right here, the eggs have been cooked so the yolks have reached an ideal jellied state. They’ve then been drenched in a sweet-sour tamarind-like sauce and scattered with crisply fried onions. Despite the fact that I wanted the satan to have extra of a voice, a theme in numerous dishes which draw back from chilli warmth, I may do injury to successive servings of those. In addition they make their very own Bombay combine. It’s wealthy in toasted peanuts and cashews, that are often in brief provide for value causes.
There’s a specific amount of what may come throughout as innovation for its personal sake among the many small plates, besides all of it works. Leeks are grilled till the purpose of give up, when they’re candy and gentle. They’re then served at room temperature with their very own model of romesco sauce, by which the bottom almonds have been substituted with floor pistachios. It’s a research in verdant shades of inexperienced. There’s a welcome acidity to the grainy romesco. New potatoes have been smoked and are lubricated by a tahini mayo and a nutty chilli oil or rayu, made with grains from the brewery. Grilled cauliflower florets are available a ripe, buttery Indian-accented mess of a sauce beneath ribbons of pickled onion.
Meat and fish don’t seem on the menu till the massive plates. There’s mutton merguez with a wild garlic salsa verde, the substances for which I pray haven’t been harvested from the fox-sprayed canal verges of Dalston. There’s a Tamworth pork chop and an entire butterflied mackerel. We order the ox cheek. It’s the least whelming of dishes. The mustard greens have heft and there’s a strong umami-tastic ancho chilli koji condiment. However the cheek merely hasn’t spent lengthy sufficient on the grill. It fights again towards the knife and fork. It nearly wins.
So significantly better is the fireplace vegetable plate, a wonderful assortment of beefy roasted tomatoes, courgettes and fennel, with white beans and squash purées, dressed with one other massive outdated salsa verde. This singular £14 dish makes the argument for the entire enterprise. It’s a demonstration of the virtuous interaction of the perfect greens and probably the most acutely managed oblique warmth and smoke. There is only one dessert tonight: a deep, darkish chocolate ganache topped by hazelnuts and a beer molasses. It’s impressively highly effective, however may have executed with a soothing dollop of chilled whipped cream.
It’s clear they need you to get deeply caught into the brewery’s providing with this meals: into beers with names like Dalston Sundown and Disco Pils, all at £5 or £6 a pint. There are solely half a dozen wines, and the most cost effective white, a dry Tokaj, is £38 a bottle, which is unfriendly. It’s additionally at odds with the cheap meals pricing. Maybe they merely don’t care a lot about wine drinkers – which is, I suppose, honest sufficient. Then once more, I got here right here for dinner, relatively than for an act of unquestioning cultist worship. And dinner, a very participating one, is what they gave me. I is probably not a religious follower of the cult. I is probably not on my knees earlier than the blessed grill. However I do have religion.
Information bites
The onward march of prime steak continues. Hawksmoor have introduced that, following openings in Manchester, Edinburgh and New York, they’re now increasing into Liverpool. The steakhouse group has at all times utilised grand buildings with historical past and the identical is true once more. Hawksmoor Liverpool will probably be situated contained in the Grade II-listed India Constructing on the nook of Brunswick and Fenwick Streets and can open later this yr. ‘It’s a tremendous website,’ co-founder Will Beckett has mentioned. ‘We’re actually excited to do it justice’ (thehawksmoor.com).
The ever-interesting chef Jay Morjaria is on to his subsequent undertaking. Having completed his Korean-inspired residency JAE at Untitled bar in London’s Dalston in February, he has now opened on the Shelter Corridor meals market on Brighton’s seafront. Tiger and Rabbit presents Morjaria’s tackle Korean barbecue, with rice, lettuce wraps and acceptable condiments, together with samjang aioli and kimchi (shelterhall.co.uk).
And whereas there are new openings, there’s additionally bleak information. In response to accountancy agency Value Bailey, greater than 1,300 British restaurant grew to become bancrupt within the yr to the top of March 2022. This was a big rise on the earlier 12 months, when 926 eating places went bust. The rise has been attributed to the top of the federal government’s numerous programmes to assist the trade via the pandemic.
Electronic mail Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or observe him on Twitter @jayrayner1
