Review at a glance: ★★★★☆
Restaurants, like everything else, are mostly about timing. Not as in waiters pausing climactically before rolling off the specials — though that is good — but about when they open, and when they are visited. Both have influence. I first went to Acme Fire Cult three years ago on a date, which was a mistake as I was in love with someone else, but also because afterwards she wanted to go clubbing.
My memories since of Acme have mostly revolved around feelings of being insufficiently cool for it, and of a strange certainty that everything arrives under a pecorino whiteout. But then in February, I was invited to “a long lunch” being laid on for a motley company of hacks and rogues-about-town. Wouldn’t you know it? After an effervescent afternoon and a bottle or 17 of very good Chardonnay, I began to wonder how I had missed the sheer sparkling brilliance of Andrew Clarke’s menu, or the ramshackle charm of his terrace. I hatched a theory that this might be a perfect summer restaurant.
A theory to stress-test, especially given by all appearances this is dining out as imagined by Quentin Tarantino: the branding is pure B-movie shtick (“It’s not a restaurant… It’s a cult”) and the location is dubious, found as it is down the end of an unmarked alleyway that by rights should house a breaker’s yard doing a sideline in hooking up car batteries to disloyal crooks. And then there’s Clarke himself, who at a glance looks like the chef for a motorcycle gang who might also knock out Pantera covers on the weekends. His are tattoos on a teddy bear: he is among the most thoughtful, considerate chefs I’ve met.
It is a thoughtfulness which has made its way onto the menu. Given the open grills and rivers of black paint, Acme appears to be a shrine to things like fat-washed hunks of meat and arm-wrestling; this is an illusion just as Clarke is. Without making a show of it, the kitchen could feed almost any party, regardless of finicky dietaries. While they warn about nut allergies, vegans, vegetarians and pescatarians would leave stuffed, and those gluten-free would do well too. Prices are fair: starters about £12, mains £25ish; glasses of wine from £6.50. The idea is come one, come all. Unless you don’t eat peanuts.
Pecorino makes its entrance, topping an Aztec pyramid of bread flooded with Acme’s homemade Marmite
We do eat peanuts, and everything else besides. First up is Marmite bread. The pecorino makes its entrance, topping an Aztec pyramid of bread with all its warrens and tunnels flooded with Acme’s homemade Marmite, made using leftover yeast from the 40ft Brewery, who share the yard. It is a triumph of umami, the strands of cheese deployed almost like salt. Order two lots and you’re done for. And why? Filling up on bread is a rookie’s folly.
Save the room. Save it for the trio of merguez, at Acme made with mutton and a cumin-led spice mix, plated up with tanging pickled onions, mojo verde, and guindilla peppers with their tips curled up like winklepickers. A clever dish, one nodding reverently to the nearby mangals that line Kingsland High Street. Or save it for vesuvio tomatoes, as big and red as cricket balls, which arrive having been rolled in green goddess sauce and laze under a parasol of sorrel leaves.
Perhaps skip the prawn and pork fat rillettes — understandably served cold (they’re rillettes) but with flavours that begged for heat. But fermented pumpkin hummus proved strangely revelatory — the revelation being that, well, pumpkin is actually rather nice. Fermenting it gave it an earthy taste.
Still, those big open grills aren’t going to waste. They smoke and sometimes spit flames. At them chefs stand — I remember them in welders’ masks, but this cannot be true — studiously turning the meat and veg. A pork chop arrived on its own, save for a circle of something sweet, cedar and tobacco-tasting, a saffron-honey mojo rojo. Gorgeous meat came with a black-and-brown top, the fat cooked to the colour of varnish and rendered with unusual skill.
Much of this is not new, but it has been perfected. Perhaps it was always somewhere for unwound summer evenings and stolen lunches, but it feels different to before. It stands out like it didn’t. Or perhaps this is simply its time.
Meal for two about £160; acmefirecult.com
