24 Great Windmill Street, London W1. No booking. Meal for two with drinks and service: £70
In the midst of this restaurant boom how we choose what to eat has begun to shift upstream. We used to decide where to go based on vague criteria: did we like small-plate pan-Asian tapas-sharing concepts? (Did we ever?) Was it beard friendly? Could we find our way home from there while steaming drunk with a traffic cone on our head? Having chosen the location, we would then manage the business of picking off a big list of dishes. Did we want an effete thing done with white fish, or a hulking and testosterone-drenched plateful involving the back end of a pig or perhaps something smeared in miso and desperation?
By convention we accept unquestioningly that one kitchen can manage all these ingredients to the same degree. And, of course, the good ones can. Now, however, a new possibility is offering itself: the single-item restaurant. In London and elsewhere there are now places that do only fried chicken or steamed Chinese buns or, as with this week’s restaurant, only chops.
Think of it as the Tokyo-isation of the capital. Famously, Tokyo has more restaurants per head than any other city in the world. When I investigated its restaurant scene a few years back the numbers quoted at me varied between 60,000 and 300,000. Let’s just settle on a whole bunch. This massive volume has resulted in vast competition – it really is one of the best places to eat out – and that vast competition has resulted in specialisation.
The idea of a “Japanese” restaurant covering all the bases from raw fish to ramen to battered things thrown in the deep-fat fryer is alien there. Instead, in Tokyo there are restaurants that do nothing but tempura or yakitori or dumplings. In Tokyo I went to a restaurant that cooked only eel. You could have it one of two ways. As a result, the two ways were very good indeed.
You could regard this as a restriction on choice. In truth I think it just shifts the choice from inside the restaurant door to outside. Your menu is now a selection of different places each doing a small number of things. The one complication: you’ll have to find mates who want the same small number of things. Which in the case of Blacklock is chops – lots of them. It occupies a space on Soho’s Great Windmill Street which used to be an illegal strip club. This has presented the owners with the opportunity to make various unsavoury jokes on social media about moving from one meat market to another – an opportunity they have not resisted.
Not that you could spot its previous incarnation. It has the look of an inner-city youth club given a makeover courtesy of a big European Union grant. I mean this in a nice way. There is an industrial metal staircase painted black, and down the middle a huge communal table banged together from a lot of raw planks. The walls have been taken back to the bare brick and then whitewashed. All it needs is a ping-pong table and the look would be complete. They already have the soundtrack: a lot of 80s pop. If you like Divo you’ll like Blacklock. Unlike a youth club, they serve cocktails at a fiver each. Grandma’s Spiked Lemonade is a 90s retro alcopop. The Old Fashioned is better.
What matters, of course, are the chops. Blacklock is founded by three veterans of the Hawksmoor steakhouse group, so the quality of the meat need not detain us. They’re using the good stuff. It is named after the Blacklock foundry in America’s deep south, antique irons from which they use to press the meat on to the grill. The only clear mark of the Hawksmoor group is in the pre-chop bites: a trio of crackers for £3 stacked with either egg and a curl of salted anchovy, a hunk of cheese and their own crunchy pickled vegetables or something called “filthy ham”, which had run out the night we were there. A similar idea is on the menu at Foxlow, the Hawksmoor diffusion line, and, as there, these are more a distraction from the wait for the main event than a starter.
So: chops. Scribbled up on blackboards painted on to the pillars are that night’s choices. There are “skinny” lamb cutlets, lamb neck, pork loin or pork belly, and beef shortrib. One costs £4. A stack of each costs £15 for the lamb and £11 for the pork. Or for £20 each you can go “all in” and have a mixed pile, plus a couple of sides. Some of this language is wearisome. All in? Filthy? Skinny? I’m 48 and I find all this eye rolling I now have to do exhausting. Please stop.
Still, we do go “all in” and it strikes me as the main purpose of the place. A nice piece of antique willow pattern-style crockery turns up heaped with chops laid over charred flatbread. The lamb tastes of proper animal, and the ribbon of fat at its back is good and crisped. They remind me of lamb chops I have eaten in Turkey; I can say no better. Ditto the pork belly chops. The only issue is that, piled up like this in the gloom, one bit of flesh begins to taste much like another. Still, it’s a good taste. There is no salt and pepper on the table which is fine. They don’t need it. They are vigorously seasoned. And at the bottom is the treat: fluffy flatbread which has soaked up the juices.
Side dishes are OK. We like the barbecued baby gem, and the sweet potato presented still-smouldering from the ash it has apparently been roasted in. But there are no chips. Given all the filthy talk, this seems prim. You’re doing chops. Where are the chips? Give us chips. And while you’re at it some sauces, too, please. They have English mustard and nothing else. I wanted Dijon because I laugh in the face of both patriotism and unsubtle mustard.
Dessert is restricted to a vanilla cheesecake served dinner party-style from a big dish, and only that. But then if you’d wanted choice you would have gone somewhere else, wouldn’t you? And that’s the point. Blacklock is not dining as event. It’s too quick to be the focus of the evening. It’s the thing you do before or after the other thing you do. It’s there to make life simpler. On those terms it works.
Jay’s news bites
■ For more meat action try the Gunton Arms, near Norwich, where they serve glorious steaks seared on a plancha over open flame in a hearth beneath the skull of a giant elk. Sniff the testosterone. Located on a deer park, Gunton also does interesting things with venison. All this and an astonishing collection of contemporary art (theguntonarms.co.uk).
■ The company that ran a pop-up last summer featuring past winners of BBC’s MasterChef has gone bust, leaving both chefs and food businesses out of pocket. Swiftsure Projects, founded by former Evening Standard journalist Simon Davis, has creditors including businesses run by Simon Rogan, Sat Bains and Gordon Ramsay.
■ A restaurant dedicated to entomophagy, the human consumption of insects, is to open in Haverfordwest this summer. Grub Kitchen will be part of Dr Beynon’s Bug Farm, an educational centre run by entomologist Dr Sarah Beynon. A previous insect-based restaurant, Edible, traded briefly in London’s Exmouth Market a decade ago (drbeynonsbugfarm.com).
Email Jay atjay.rayner@observer.co.uk. Follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1
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