We’re well into British barbecue season now. Any excuse, really, but the weather is baking and who knows how long the warmth will last? Who cares. Come rain or shine, we brave cooks dust off our BBQ tongs and prepare locally famous burger patties, source plump sausages from keen butchers and trim hedges in preparation for table tennis and inflatables.
Still, beyond the clutches of suburbia are London’s barbecue joints, primed and ready at any time. A tender brisket is to be savoured year-round. That means Texan smoked meats cooked low and slow, the heat of Middle Eastern charcoal grill, the sizzle of a Korean tabletop ’cue.
So from smoked ribs and jerk chicken to cauliflower shawarma, goat curry and even a couple of British, ahem, bangers, here are 16 barbecue restaurants in London worth getting fired up over. And none require an umbrella.
Acme Fire Cult
Sharing plates, natural wine, luxuriantly-bearded chefs and craft beer (Acme is a partnership with the 40FT Brewery next door) tick off the cool east London checklist, but it’s the wood-fired grill that brings diners from all over the capital to this site near Dalston Kingsland station. There’s a Nordic-looking dining room but it’s the heated, covered terrace around the grill that has the best seats in the house. Unfashionable meats like mutton and bavette and veg dishes such as celeriac with mushroom kelp XO smoke over the coals, while seafood is a good shout too: Dorset crab with bone marrow and a salted cabbage and jalapeño verde, for instance. Look out for the new izakaya menu as well.
Abbot Street, E8 2LX, acmefirecult.com
The Barbary
A North African sibling of Chinatown’s Palomar, The Barbary has the same counter seating but here arranged in a horseshoe around a central grill where the flames guarantee sealed-in flavour, though your clothes may smell of charred protein the next morning. A blackened curl of octopus tentacle, smoky without, meltingly soft within and served atop coriander-scattered chickpeas is the star turn, though the menu is short enough that two people could eat their way through most of it, from nibbles of falafel and dolma to chicken shawarma, salmon dukkah and Jaffa-style cauliflower. New dishes are expected soon; details are presently under wraps. Excellent cocktails, too.
16 Neal’s Yard, WC2H 9DP, thebarbary.co.uk
Mangal 2
Brothers Ferhat and Sertaç Dirik took over their dad’s Dalston dining room in 2020, kept the name and the ocakbasi charcoal grill and set about creating one of the most exciting Turkish restaurants outside Istanbul, reflecting their experience as young Londoners of Turkish heritage. Ferhat oversees front of house and a low-intervention wine list, though Sertaç has now parted ways to pursue other projects. In his stead, a trusted team cooks British ingredients with a modern Turkish accent and a zero-waste approach: cull yaw kofte with grilled apple, say, or whole grilled mackerel with a smoked bone butter and chemen. Hot stuff.
4 Stoke Newington Road, N16 7XN, mangal2.com
Cue Point
Still in residency at JuJus Bar at the Truman Brewery development off Brick Lane, pop-up Cue Point is a British/Afghan catering company where the inspiration on the plate is just as important as the intentions behind the business. Founders Mursal Saiq and Joshua Moroney support refugees with professional catering courses and qualifications as well as language skills and trauma therapy: food for thought while tucking into their new BBQ platter, laden with supple, smoked-on-site beef brisket, crispy chicken wings, cheese-blanketed sausage pinwheel, burnished hunks of roast potatoes, pickles and slaw. For something smaller, there’s a box of roasties draped with rosy slices of fire cooked bavette with salad and lashings of sauces.
Arches 225-228, Fielding Street, SE17 3HD and 1-3 Denmark Street, WC2H 8LP, cue-point.co.uk
Brat Climpsons Arch
Tomos Parry has pretty much pioneered the art of cooking over fire in London, a technique the chef mastered on camping trips in his native Anglesey, though the Basque Country is just as much of an influence on the menu as north Wales. This London Fields offshoot of the Shoreditch Brat seems more in tune with the great outdoors thanks to seating on plastic chairs on a marquee-covered courtyard, though the flame-licked food cooked in the open kitchen is just as accomplished as at the original: pleasingly fat chops of rare breed Tamworth and Large Black crossed with Saddleback and Duroc rested to a blush within, wild river trout with early season potatoes and Cornish hake throats known as ‘kokotxas’ in Basque, served with peas.
374 Helmsley Place, E8 3SB, bratrestaurant.co.uk
Brigadiers
An Indian spin on barbecue from the team behind Gymkhana, the Brigadiers kitchen features tandoors, charcoal grills, rotisseries, wood ovens and smokers. The results taste as good as that suggests, not only because the likes of bhuna ghee masala kid goat chops are cooked to finger-lickin’ perfection, but most things come drenched in some of the most delicious sauces in London: barbecue butter chicken wings, we’re looking at you. There are sports on the big screen, plus pool and card tables for those who prefer to be more active participants.
1-5 Bloomberg Arcade, EC4N 8AR, brigadierslondon.com
Texas Joe’s
Texan native and 10-gallon hat fan Joe Walters is the name behind this Bermondsey barbecue joint which comes with the seal of approval of the Dragon’s Den judges, who Walters persuaded to invest in his beef jerky business. Beef brisket, chicken thighs, pork ribs and mutton shoulder are slow cooked over oak to smoky, melt-in-the-mouth dreaminess; side orders of bacon-wrapped jalapeños, cakey jalapeño cornbread and creamy mac’n’cheese are every bit as delicious.
8-9 Snowfields, SE1 3SU, texas-joes.com
Berber & Q Grill House
The kind of cool restaurant-cum-dive club one might find in Tel Aviv, Josh Katz’s Haggerston railway arch combines the primal thrill of piles of smoky meats cooked over live fire with the phenomenal salad skills the chef picked up working for Ottolenghi. That apprenticeship means that veg dishes such as the roasted cauliflower, pilpelchuma butter, rose, pine nuts and tahini every bit as good as Urfa chili pork belly, smoked aubergine cream, sweet ‘n sour rhubarb, pickled grilled radicchio, and everything is seasoned with fragrant spices and fresh herbs, plus a knock-your-socks off garlic sauce for dipping. Sister restaurant Carmel in Queen’s Park is more chilled out.
Arch 338, Acton Mews, E8 4EA, berberandqgrillhouse.com
Parrillan Borough Yards
Determined to have an outdoor ’cue experience without actually doing any of the work? London’s second Parrillan, near Borough Market, improves on the King’s Cross original by having a team of professional chefs not customers in charge of cooking, so guests can instead maximise the BBQ vibe on a terrace knocking back a Spanish drinks list (not just wine but sangria, sherry and gintónicas) before tucking into hunks of flame-licked protein from the wood-fired grill: lagarto ibérico, lomo bajo beef with mojo verde, and fish of the day. Why so Spanish? Owner Sam Hart is also behind Barrafina.
4 Dirty Lane, SE1 9PA, parrillan.co.uk/borough-yards
Smoking Goat
Two of Ben Chapman’s London ventures, Smoking Goat and Kiln, both involve Thai grill cooking but the Shoreditch restaurant probably better corresponds to what most people imagine Thai barbecue to be like, not least because there are some seriously strong cocktails to cool the palate from the riot of hot and sour flavours. Expect unctuous pork skewers and turmeric mackerel gnarled from the barbecue and a hearty massaman lumpen with smoked beef cheek. Properly robust levels of bird's eye chilli heat might not be for the faint-hearted, but all are aided with frosty glasses of lager.
64 Shoreditch High Street, E1 6JJ, smokinggoatbar.com
Humo
The Spanish word for “smoke”, Humo takes a barbecue enthusiast’s obsession with cooking with fire and smoke to another level of gastronomic geekery. The idea here is to flavour food according to the best of wood, being silver birch, apple, ubame white oak and cherry. Expect birch roasted cauliflower, grapefruit, tunworth, Australian winter black truffle; oak smoked Cornish Agria potatoes, wild rocket, ash grown herbs, tardivo, frisée and coria; seven-day aged Scottish wild halibut, Shetland mussels, beech roasted leeks, morels, wild garlic. With hidden depth ever at its core philosophy, there’s a chef’s table below the restaurant floor that offers a ten course tasting menu, too.
12 St George Street, W1S 2FB, humolondon.com
Smokestak
Chef David Carter jacked in a career working for the likes of Gordon Ramsay to move to Texas, buy himself a smoker and teach himself the art of barbecuing. Ramsay (and Texas’s) loss is London’s gain for Smokestak, a slow-cooked, wood-smoked specialist which began life as a food truck trundling around the capital’s food markets, is a labour of love to treasure. His brisket smoked over kiln-dried English oak is a thing of beauty but there’s also coal-roasted aubergine with red miso for the veggies and wood-roasted bone marrow with parsley to rival St John.
35 Sclater Street, E1 6LB, smokestak.co.uk
Cinder
The debut solo project of former Ritz chef Jake Finn, Cinder is a pair of smoke-and-small plates restaurants in Belsize Park and St John’s Wood: two bright spots for north Londoners who don’t fancy slumming it out east for a fix of flame-licked cooking. Here the heat comes courtesy of a coal fire Josper grill, which provides the essential flavour for their roasted squash, cashew dukkah and chimichurri, BBQ octopus, potato salad, pickled cucumber and T-bone steak, smoked bone marrow bordelaise.
66 Belsize Lane, NW3 5BJ and 5 St John’s Wood High Street, NW8 7NG, cinderrestaurant.co.uk
Smokehouse
The granddaddy of London barbecue restaurants, Smokehouse opened in Islington around 10 years ago and set a template for much that followed: excellent native ingredients — day-boat fish, whole British carcasses, seasonal veg — grilled over charcoal and smoked with sustainably sourced English oak. Expect slow cooked lamb shoulder with jersey royals, thick slabs of retired dairy cow and bronzed corn-fed chicken varnished with jus and tumbled with morels.
63-69 Canonbury Road, N1 2DG, smokehouseislington.co.uk
