Lagom at Hackney Church Brew Co, 16-17 Bohemia Place, London E8 1DU (020 8986 2643). Small plates £1.50-£8, large plates £9-£29 (for whole chicken), wines from £25, beers around £5 a pint

Down a shadowed road an old man shambles. He’s wearing a secondhand pinstripe jacket and sensible shoes with cushioned soles. Pools of buttercup-yellow light spread from reconditioned railway arches, illuminating the uncreased faces of the Friday-night crew outside, bottles of the finest local microbrew in hand. Music booms. There’s a cavernous bar gilded in red neon with the legend Night Tales. Broad-shouldered bouncers stand sentry, thumbing their phones. The old man shuffles past, aware it’s not for him.

I can’t help but feel a little sorry for him. This is because the old man is me. I have come to where the young people are and I feel like David Attenborough in the Galapagos, only with more trepidation and fewer cameras. I know why I am here. I’ve spent the afternoon scanning the menus of restaurants staring you down with starters at £15 and mains at £25 plus and I’m fed up. It feels exclusive. There’s a place for restaurants like that – expense can be justified. But too many of those menus read like a false promise and I’m not in the mood to believe them.

So here I am, in Hackney, on what will turn out to be the right side of the tracks, looking for good food, fairly priced. Down in one of these arches is the Hackney Church Brew Co, named after the spire across the road. Not long ago they welcomed chef Elliot Cunningham and his semi-permanent pop-up Lagom. There is a brewery and next to it a huge red-brick arch of a bar area, the ceiling painted black. The floor is fitted with over-engineered refectory-style tables. Like me, they’re all extremely chunky.

You order both drinks and food from the counter, the latter coming from a small, smoky open kitchen just behind. That, in turn, looks out on to an urban garden, which makes a virtue of gravel, strings of glowing bulbs overhead and the business end of air-conditioning units. There are picnic tables. Laden waiters wander about looking for the number sign you were given when you ordered. A couple of whippets snooze on a blanket by the kitchen. Twentysomethings, who have probably abandoned all hope of saving to get on the housing ladder because my generation screwed it all up for them, crowd those tables, choosing instead to spend their money here.

If all this sounds uncomfortable and noisy and chaotic to you, then by all means stay away. But just be aware you will be missing out on some bold live-fire cooking that throbs uncompromisingly with flavour. I live for a bit of throbbing flavour, me. And because it comes without fripperies – who needs linen or chairs or a full table service? – the price really is decent.

Elliot Cunningham is half Swedish and that heritage supplies the word lagom, a term that’s difficult to translate literally, according to the internet. I’m told it means “not too much and not too little” or thereabouts. That describes the very short, simple food offering. Cunningham says he wants to prove that there’s more to cooking over wood fire than just hunks of meat, though he’s exceptionally good at those. A slab of bone-in pork belly is slow-cooked then rubbed with fermented chilli and the sweet sugary hit of liquid jaggery from the kithul palm, before being allowed to wallow in the gentle heat and smoke of the grill. The result is soft, with an encouraging outer crunch. It is a plate of caramelisation and melting fat. It’s an awful lot of top pig action for £10.

Sutton Hoo chicken is given the same long and slow treatment, to produce crisp skin and meat that peels away from the bone without being dry, with the high waft of the smoke it has been embraced lovingly by for hours. Tonight, among the specials, there is a smoked beef bun for £8, made with featherblade cooked for 12 hours, rested then slapped with more fermented chilli.

So far, so barbecue. It’s the non-meat dishes that are more striking. Golden beetroot is roasted over the coals until soft, then sliced up into something approximating a carpaccio. Those slices are dressed with a fine acidic emulsion punched up with molasses, along with crushed hazelnuts and torn mint leaves. I’ve eaten an awful lot of beetroot over the past few years. I’ve eaten so much of the red variety I’ve had nights when my pee turned pink. This was the best plate of the stuff I have eaten in years.

A big serving of closed-cap mushrooms for a fiver are long smoked to an almost meaty intensity and dressed with dollops of boisterous salsa verde; courgettes are grilled and served with chilli, mint and lemon. There is a white coleslaw full of crunch and salt and vinegar, and “crispy” potatoes the colour of polished gold, with undulations and crevices and curled bits. They aren’t just crisp, they are crispy. Each plate is a simple idea, expressed vividly and with care so that the key ingredient gets to shout its name.

There is no dessert on the menu today, but at weekends they serve cherry pie. These have already been made in preparation for the rush. And yes, if I ask nicely, they will pop one in the oven. A note of warning: it is a dish with a sugared pastry crust. If you are livid about this being described as a pie because there isn’t pastry all the way round, please write to your MP. They’ve not got much on at the moment. Beneath that toffeed crust is what happens to fresh cherries cooked down in sugar syrup for a long time. On the side is a gravy boat of double cream. The dish is a tenner, and is designed to serve two, even if one of them is me.

I drink wine, because I am that bloke, but it’s called the Hackney Church Brew Co, and they have a fine selection of their own IPAs, pilsners and lagers. I walk out of the service road down the side of these reconditioned railway arches, where the generation below me throng, with a proper spring and jump in my step. I went in a tourist. I came out ready to be a regular.

News bites

Edo in the centre of Belfast also has a smoky, live fire focus to its cooking courtesy of the wood burning Bertha oven at the heart of the kitchen. Much of chef Jonny Elliott’s menu is a robust take on classic tapas: there are croquetas, tortillas and padron peppers. But there are also salt room aged steaks and fish dishes sent for a spin through the intense heat of the apple and pear wood-burning Bertha (edorestaurant.co.uk).

Despite a slew of big openings, it’s clear the hospitality business is finding trading tough. The latest casualties are the highly regarded Picture restaurants in London’s Marylebone and Fitzrovia, the second of which I reviewed positively in 2017. The owners have announced their closure, saying the business is no longer viable. Happily, they are doing it the right way, closing the restaurants ‘without leaving anyone out of pocket’.

Meanwhile in Ilkley, Simon and Rena Gueller have announced they are looking for a buyer for the Box Tree, which they took over in 2004. It opened in 1962 and was an early point of gastronomic pilgrimage for British restaurant goers, becoming one of the very first places in the UK to be awarded two Michelin stars.

Jay Rayner’s book My Last Supper: One Meal, a Lifetime in the Making is published by Guardian Faber at £16.99, buy it for £11.99 atguardianbookshop.com

Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1