I used to go all the time to Dehesa, Soho’s best Spanish restaurant, and I always used to have the pork belly with rosemary-flavoured white bean stew – until I started to make it at home. That’s the problem with enjoying cooking as much as eating out. Fortunately, however, the latest venture from the team behind Dehesa, Ember Yard, features a great number of terrific dishes, mostly chargrilled, that the most enthusiastic home chef would have trouble replicating. For a start, you’d have to have the right equipment, though here the menu is of assistance: as well as describing the dishes, it tells you the types of wood they’re cooked on,
Ember Yard is right at the top of Berwick Street in Soho. A little revival or transformation is occurring around here, at the unloved scrag ends of these streets that run northwards from Soho and join up to Oxford Street: one block to the east, at the top of Wardour Street, for instance, is the latest, biggest branch of central London coffee favourite TAP (formerly Tapped & Packed). This is very welcome, given that the heart of the heart of London may be about to disappear, what with the development of Sex Alley (Walker’s Court, to give it its formal name) and the demolition of several blocks of Soho to make way for Crossrail – a development which puts one in mind of Douglas Adams’s description of bypasses – and the inevitable arrival of the attendant Costas, Caffe Neros and all those other chains of which we already have more than enough iterations; independents and small chains holding their own against the Primarkisation of Central London are worth supporting.
The heart of the heart of London may be about to disappear, what with the development of Sex Alley (Walker’s Court, to give it its formal name) and the demolition of several blocks of Soho to make way for Crossrail
Fortunately, something else that seems to be in abatement round these parts is the tyranny of the No Reservations rule (or, as I like to call it, the How To Ensure I Never Visit Your Restaurant rule). Ember Yard’s space – on two floors, with plenty of tables and plenty of space between them – is welcoming visually too; keener gourmets can choose, as I did, to sit at the bar. You miss out on some of the essential restaurant buzz – and certainly, when I made my way downstairs to visit the loos, the basement floor had a real party atmosphere, at its centre a chef carving petals of cured meat from a haunch of pig – but in this slightly quieter corner you do get to watch one of the most photogenic brigades in London doing their thing. (You also, watching orders come and go, timestamped, scribbled on and amended, may feel slight panic that yours – you can see it from here – might have been lost. All that’d happened was that no-one had told me the chocolate dessert, one of those molten cakey ones, would take 15 minutes to prepare.)
Belly of Old Spot with Basque cider
There are a couple of large plates on offer – a Gloucester Old Spot pork belly and a charcoal-grilled skirt steak, which looked terrific as the staff took it out to lucky diners, but which would still need a fair few smaller plates to bulk it out to a full meal for two. Fortunately there’re plenty of such options to choose from, and they’re humanely priced, avoiding that all too common situation with which the term “tapas” is now synonymous wherein you leave the restaurant wanting to go on somewhere for a proper substantial dinner, but have somehow spent your entire evening’s budget on some bits of chorizo and a tortilla sliver. No such problems at Ember Yard, where even a snack-sized serving of anchovies is substantial: indeed, these four fat fishes set in series on a block of age-seasoned wood are the biggest anchovies I think I’ve ever seen. Charcoal-grilled mackerel is matched well with the zesty escabeche bed of fennel ribbons, piquillo pepper and mussels it’s served on. And while an octopus tentacle cooked a la plancha and served with pepperonata is good but unremarkable, cuttlefish with soft n’duja sausage and roasted pumpkin is more unusual, and texturally satisfying: three different soft yielding textures in alignment, and none of them mushy.
Pick of a very pork-focused menu is the Iberico presa, slices of loin seared all round but still reddishly rare at the centre. These pieces – smoky, savoury, and terrifically textured – are served with dods of whipped jamón butter, and I could eat about forty of them. A beef burger – more of a slider – is immensely popular: I saw about a dozen of these constructed and sent out during an hour at the kitchen counter. It’s perfectly fine, a sort of oversized meatball with a very agreeable melted-almost-to-burnt cheese topping, but there are any number of better and more Ember Yard-specific dishes I’d pick over it.
My dining companion thought it “bland”, and the thyme element “revolting”
Desserts are, thankfully, a step up from the lazy retro ice cream sundaes still so prevalent round here. A brown butter panna cotta with an excellent raisin and thyme ice cream and generous chunks of (essentially) chocolate shortbread is the standout for me, even if my dining companion thought it “bland”, and the thyme element “revolting”. Cheesecake topped with orange segments and drizzled in amaretto is a close runner-up for my favourite, with that perfect cheesecake texture: neither too fluffy and moussey nor too stomach-clangingly dense. And while the aforementioned bitter chocolate ganache could do with being a bit bitterer and more characterful, the accompanying salted caramel ice cream is that nowadays rare thing, a properly salted take on this slightly threadbare flavour combination.
It takes confidence, I think, to open a second big Soho branch maybe ten minutes’ walk from the original, and so much bigger. Ember Yard has a very sensible strategy of reserving some sixteen or so settings on the street-level dining room (all at communal high tables or at the bar overlooking the kitchen) for walk-ins but taking bookings for the remainder. It’s perfectly feasible then, to walk in at lunchtime on a Sunday and be seated straight away, though probably more difficult on a busy evening – when you might pause outside the busy, lively space with its excellent menu, and wonder how you can get in on it. C
Ember Yard, 60 Berwick Street, London W1
020-7439 8057; emberyard.co.uk