Fay Maschler reviews Smokestak: Smoking hot street food finds a home

Inside the restaurant, it is as if you have plunged into an opera about barbecue, says Fay Maschler
Grill power: barbecued meat and desserts are prepared with attention to detail and passion at Smokestak in Shoreditch
Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures
Fay Maschler23 November 2017

If you can’t find the number in Sclater Street heading from Boxpark towards Brick Lane, the heady scent of woodsmoke, nicotine-coloured corners of Dickensian windowpanes and terrace tables so solid you couldn’t move them away if you wanted to announce where David Carter, a main man in the arena of London’s street food, has come to rest. Well, not rest exactly.

Having worked front-of-house at Gordon Ramsay at Claridge’s and at Roka, he left that scene in 2013 and went to the US to study barbecue, and specifically to Houston, Texas, to buy a smoker. That baby — maybe the same one that is in the restaurant — weighs 4.5 tonnes and is seven metres long. Carter’s Barbadian heritage affirms wood and coals as the natural approach to fixing food — and it’s not just meat that gets the treatment.

Once inside the restaurant it is as if you have plunged into an opera about barbecue. Characters clang and bustle around a hefty, high-ceilinged, heavy metal-painted set where wheels spin, pistons pump and pulleys plunge at the beating heart where men — and some women — meet fire-propelled machinery. You listen for Howlin’ Wolf singing Smokestack Lightnin’ but thumpier music and notably genial staff pitch the mood lighter. Tales of the decency and generosity of Carter have reached me and, as ever, attitude trickles down from the top.

It was brisket buns with pickled red chillies that galvanised the queues at Street Feast Dalston Yard, Dinerama, Hawker House and Broadgate Ice Rink. The butter-varnished, filled bun is sold here at £5 but on a first visit I strongly recommend trying the piece of brisket at £8. Its open texture, deep flavour and soft-as-silk potential is maximised by low and slow-cooking, basting and respectful resting in oiled butchers’ paper. Three thick, almost impossibly succulent, treacly-edged slices are served with punchy ketchup and, of course, the cheery chillies that have a might of their own.

Before embarking on that you can set sail with scratchings, one light-as-air curved piece of roasted pork skin dusted with Szechuan pepper and the salt that counters that hotness, and pigtails, the bony protuberances cut in pieces, simmered in chicken stock and varnished with barbecue sauce. Unputdownable.

Macho meat is not encouraged to dominate unchallenged. On the first visit we leaven the impact with salt-baked beetroot, goats’ curd and hazelnuts — a bit gastropubby — and a sprightly slaw composed of shaved celery, almonds and preserved lemons. At the second dinner I order fish — cured and hot-smoked salmon served with creamy horseradish. It is probably about as close to meat as fish can come…

Highlight: brisket with ketchup
Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures

Thick-cut pork rib, elements in the lacquering perfectly balanced, is presented with pickled cucumber to redress its polished richness. With that we order jacket potato, which arrives as a shell baked rigid in which swims potato pottage let down with soured cream flavoured with chives. Vegetables take to grilling well — I am sure that carrots with thyme and honey are exemplary — but baby gem crumples and gives up under a swathe of bacon gremolata. A shame, since bacon gremolata is such a cunning notion.

Thick, almost impossibly succulent slices of brisket with treacly edges are served with punchy ketchup

Desserts also play with charring, as in sticky toffee pudding with burnt butter ice cream. Fabulous as that is, I like even better plum crumble — also cooked in a small iron cocotte — with the fruit firm, not dilapidated, the topping nutty and the accompaniment of malt ice cream dreamy. Toasted ice cream with salted hazelnut praline sets the seal on a theme running right through what actually turns out to be a gastronomic rock concert.

Cocktails enter the fray with the likes of Burnt Peach Old Fashioned, Penicillin with its inclusion of peat and Smoke, containing tequila, smoke, lime and ginger. Beers are brewed locally in Bermondsey and Dalston. The wine list that jumps in increments of £5 from a starting point of £20, offering most choices by the glass, is realistically more bountiful in the reds. Moobuzz 2013, the Monterey County pinot noir, seems wholly appropriate.

Fabulous: sticky toffee pudding with burnt butter ice cream
Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures

Bookings are taken for lunchtime and for parties of four or more at night. A communal table seemingly constructed from tarred railway sleepers shows a brisk turnover and there are seats at the counter for students of barbecue. The small, moody, candlelit bar downstairs is worth noting, as are the loos. Industrial theming doesn’t let up and water at exactly the right temperature gushes from copper pipes.

As David Carter has remarked, whether fine dining or street food, everything requires attention to detail and passion.

Mon-Sat noon-3pm and 5.30pm-11pm. Sun noon-9pm. A meal for two with wine/cocktails about £80 inc.12.5 per cent service charge.

Visit standard.co.uk/restaurants for the latest news and reviews from London’s food scene.

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