12 Maiden Lane, London WC2 (020 3728 4888). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £80
Chaps, a word of advice: if you're eating at the new outpost of the Big Easy group in London's Covent Garden, pee beforehand. Calling it a schlep to the men's bogs is a little like saying Kerry Katona doesn't mind talking about her private life occasionally. Even our waiter told my companion to "take a packed lunch". Down and down you go, through brick-walled rooms painted black, past industrial-strength blast doors and riveted girders, evidence that this really was once the power station that lit the first electric lights in London's West End. "Blimey," my friend said, when he returned. "I could have caught a Piccadilly Line train from down there."
The trek is not without its benefits. It lets you see the open kitchen. For this is a new entrant to the increasingly crowded American BBQ market and, like maths exams for 14-year-olds, we want to see all the workings in the margins. These don't disappoint. There is a wood-fired oven full of faggots burning so brightly it looks like the stage of the London Palladium. There are glass-sided grills full of red-hot burning coals. There are flames. They call it their "wall of fire" as if this was less a restaurant than a movie from the producers of Top Gun. Still, I see their point. Further down in the basement, presumably somewhere near the earth's core, are BBQ smokers imported from the US, run on oak, apple, hickory and cherry wood. There is a 1,500kg lobster tank. There is stuff.
This can all be very convincing. It's easy to swoon at the back-lit bar, with its 500+ bottles of rare spirits, more than 300 of them whisky, a shimmering piece of accidental art in amber. It's easy to be cheered by the blackboards with their lists of lobsters by weight. But I'm a cynical bastard and have seen too many floundering brands attempt to relaunch themselves with big-name chef signings, and revolutionised menus, with it all amounting to a fart of nothingness.
God knows the Big Easy group needed a makeover. They put the "Errrr!" into ersatz, peddled a sloppy kind of Americana that relied too heavily on sugar and approximation to make an impact. With serious players in the market, such as Pitt Cue and the almost venerable Bodeans, they needed to justify their existence. So they hired big, smoke-singed, pig-fat smeared names including Kenny Callaghan, the former chef partner in Blue Smoke – Danny Meyer's much-lauded American BBQ restaurant in New York. Working with him is Pete Daversa, former pit master at Hill Country Barbecue Market, also in New York. This is the equivalent of getting Pharrell Williams in to produce your album. (Oh yeah, I can do references to young peoples' music. Bite me.)
Frankly, names like that could have taken the dosh and phoned it in. They didn't. The result, within the narrow bandwidths of these things, is pretty damn stupendous. If you like your BBQ – and I do – you will love this. And if you don't, you are dead to me, on both counts. It starts quietly. Properly jointed chicken wings are well smoked and well sauced. Their thick-sliced, pit-smoked bacon is better still, a reminder (if not a copy) of the glorious version they serve at the legendary Peter Luger's in Brooklyn.
But then the ribs arrive, and oh my! They do only one kind – dry-rubbed St Louis – which is a good sign. It's the places which try to cover all culinary traditions – Texas, Kansas, the Carolinas – that are missing the point. In BBQ you choose a team and you stick with it. These are thick cut. The meat has the obligatory (but not often found) pink tinge that comes with long exposure to smoke. The meat doesn't fall off the bone, and it shouldn't. This is an animal's rib. It should speak of a life lived, and this does. The rub is serious without being overwhelming, and on the side is a jug of their barbecue sauce which isn't just sugar and vinegar. It has depth and power.
An even more convincing sign that deep knowledge has been brought to bear is their pulled pork. Too often in Britain it's an over-shredded, over-sauced mush. You could stuff cushions with it. This has texture. There are dark, sticky bits of the caramelised outside. You can tell this was once a piggy shoulder that has given of itself.
From the wood-fired oven we get the "crabshack combo" – we forgive these awful names – of mussels, clams, crab claws and large prawns, bashed through the wood-burning oven in a sprightly cream and white-wine sauce of a sort you could dab behind your ears and, frankly, probably will by accident. This is a fingers job. The heat is so extreme that the shells are friable and the meats have become crisped around the edges. A dunk in the sauce and they swim again.
Of the sides, potato salad is a disappointment. It is so much under-dressed floppy carbs. Coleslaw is serviceable. Mac and cheese is impressive, not least because we completely forgot it was there. Even after half an hour it had not coagulated. Strands of cheese came up with the still-liquid sauce. The breadcrumbs were still crunchy. Everyone is having a crack at this dish at the moment. Most are screwing it up. They should try the one here.
Perhaps even more surprising were the baked beans. We were avoiding them. We'd eaten enough without a hit of sugary, claggy beans. They were nothing of the sort: these were zesty and invigorating. I have never had baked beans that were refreshing before.
Desserts are currently not made on site but, for all that, the sticky-toffee pudding deserves an honourable mention for getting the sponge-toffee ratio right.
And the price for all this? Very competitive covers it. Both the rib and seafood platters are in the mid-teens. They do half a lobster for £12.50 and a whole one for £20. The prices for steaks are close to astonishing. A 400g ribeye is £24.50 (by comparison at Restaurant 34 a 320g ribeye is £36). Then again this is a mass-volume operation, with all the noise and clatter that comes with it. Music booms. People whoop and shout. My 16-year-old self would have loved it, would have dreamed of nights lost here. My duller 47-year-old self will settle for the quieter pleasures of lunch, and be very happy indeed.
Jay's news bites
■ The glorious interplay of fire and meat is, of course, not only a feature of American BBQ. The Turks were at it a long time before, with their smokey mangals, the open charcoal fires for the quick searing of meats. Try the cheerful and relatively cheap FM Mangal in Camberwell, south London. There are the usual meze to kick off with but they're merely a curtain raiser for the main event: the lamb chops, koftke, chicken wings and kebabs which are their calling card.
■ It's time for baggy-arsed food writers like Bill Knott of the Financial Times, Tracey MacLeod of the Independent and yours truly to prove they know one end of an oven from the other as we take over the kitchen for the Too Many Critics event in aid of Action Against Hunger. This year it will be held on 8 June at the Italian L'Anima, in the City of London. Tickets are £120 for dinner and champagne reception. Visit actionagainsthunger.org.uk
■ Good news. After 16 years of continuous growth in the UK, coffee chain Starbucks has recorded a small drop in sales. Bad news: they've also recorded a rise in profits.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk. Follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1
• This article was amended on 11 May 2014. The photograph of Big Easy's smoked bacon was previously mistakenly captioned as pulled pork.
