Favourite Places, Smokestak

Sclater Street, Shoreditch

Leica M3, Summicron 35mm F2 FP4 (400)

Smokestak (Shoreditch, September ‘26)

I have spent a good part of my adult life failing to understand barbecue, a cuisine that seems to consist mainly of men in aprons standing very still beside a hot box for most of a day while looking earnest. So I approached Smokestak on Sclater Street, just off Brick Lane, with the wary air of a man entering a church of a faith he doesn't belong to. You don't need directions, it turns out. You simply follow your nose, past a parade of Shoreditch people dressed as nineteenth-century coal merchants, until the smell of woodsmoke becomes so thick you could reasonably lean on it. Inside, the place has been designed to look like the inside of a smoker: black, carbon-stained concrete, steel everywhere, and cutlery so dark you have to feel for your fork the way you feel for the light switch in a strange hotel room. I mention this not as a complaint but as a warning. I spent the first ten minutes believing I had been given no knife.

Then the brisket bun arrived and all my cynicism left me like air from a punctured lilo. I am told the brisket is smoked for up to sixteen hours with nothing but salt and pepper. This seemed to me excessive until I tasted it, at which point it seemed if anything a bit rushed. It came apart at the merest suggestion, sitting in a soft bun under a hail of pickled red chilli, and it was so good that I made the involuntary humming noise I usually reserve for warm baths and the discovery of a forgotten twenty in an old coat. We followed it with pig's tails, which I ordered partly because I wanted to tell people I had eaten pig's tails, and which proved to be crisp, sticky, and entirely free of the moral discomfort I had hoped to feel. Somewhere a pig was having a bad week, but I'm afraid, to my disgrace, I didn't think about him much.

My only real complaints are the ones I have everywhere now. The room is loud, in the way all modern restaurants are loud, as though silence had been declared a fire hazard, and the reclaimed timber seating seems to have been reclaimed from a pier in roughly 1890. But I left Smokestak in the condition every restaurant should leave you in: full, faintly smoked like a kipper, and already plotting a return. Finish with the sticky toffee pudding, then do what I did, which is walk very slowly down Brick Lane wondering whether the human body has a maximum capacity for negroni & brisket, and concluding, after some reflection, that it probably does, but that it would be cowardly not to find out………