Arch 338, Acton Mews, London E8. No reservations. Meal for two, including drinks and service: £60
Josh Katz cooks in Technicolor. His food has the bash and enthusiasm that other menus have the words for but not the flavours. Given it’s in Hackney, in a reconditioned railway arch, that there are no reservations and that there are railway sleepers involved – given that, on paper, it’s a hipster restaurant checklist as compiled by thedailymash.co.uk – this is remarkable. The lesson here is that it is possible to be both cool and good at the same time. You just have to be Josh Katz.
The first time I heard his name it was during an ambush by Terry Gilliam and Michael Palin as I was leaving a London bar. Perhaps you regard this as pathetic name dropping. Well of course it is. If you’d been ambushed by Gilliam and Palin at the same time wouldn’t you boast about it? The two of them were patrons of the Roundhouse in Camden, Katz was running the restaurant there and, as readers of my column – the Pythons have impeccable taste – they thought I should go and try it. I was so flattered, so impressed... I never did.
I did, however, make it to his next restaurant, Zest, at the cool, white space of the Jewish Community Centre on the Finchley Road where, with his chef partner Eran Tibi, he turned Jewish food in London from something heavy and bloating that shouted “infarction” at you from the plate, to a riot of bright and light and sunny. At Zest I imagined private health insurance actuaries weeping over plates of this lovely, Mediterranean food tortured by the thought that the consumers eating this stuff would now live for ever.
Tibi remains at Zest. Katz, meanwhile, has landed here in this arch, a serious schlep by taxi from the Finchley Road. His parents must think he’s emigrated, and don’t even get them started on the career choice. (Still, at least he has a brother who went into accountancy to keep an eye on the books.) There is a bare-brick arch, lots of manmade materials and heavy wood tables which are just a little too far from the banquettes along the walls. Young people’s music echoes and bounces off every surface and the air smells of smoke. At its core Berber & Q is a Mediterranean grill house; the “Q” bit comes in the adoption of some of the low and slow techniques of American BBQ, involving a smoker, used to stunning effect on some of the heftier cuts of meat.
But that’s not the whole story. Unlike the carnal houses that most new-wave BBQ joints become, Berber & Q is as interested in those things without a pulse as those with. While we wait for the animal, we are brought a terracotta dish of crème fraîche spun through with salty, fiery harissa paste, handfuls of green herbs and laid with seeded crushed tomatoes. With this is spectacularly good pitta bread, pouting gusts of steam at you as you rip open the soft pockets. The bread also does excellent service on their hummus, whipped up with tahini and studded with whole chickpeas, pine nuts and slices of fresh red chilli. This is hummus less as side dish than lingerie-clad main event.
There is roasted cauliflower, by the quarter, half and whole, vibrating with lusciousness under its dressing of salt and cumin, pomegranate and rose. A blackened aubergine salad is, in truth, a whole aubergine, roasted and split and filled with garlicky yogurt and more fronds of green. There’s also a whole pickle section full of sweet-sour dill cucumbers and effortlessly good Moroccan pickled carrots. I very much like the sound of beets with whipped feta and candied orange, grilled leeks with ras-el-hanout mayonnaise and asparagus with braised mustard seed. The non-meat eaters in your party will be very happy here indeed.
That said, I think it impossible any flesh eater could forego the meat choices here in favour of those non-meat dishes. The grills are just too good. Whole, un-jointed chicken wings, off what must be a huge bruiser of a bird, are marinated in harissa and then roasted to a sweet, hot, sticky blackness. There is whole spiced forequarter of lamb, long roasted and repeatedly basted with cumin and paprika butter and then shredded, to be eaten rolled up in crisp green leaves of mint, dill, and flat-leaf parsley. It feels both good for you and shameful at the same time. There are boned-out chicken thighs, and their own merguez sausages, the colour of old claret, dribbling their juices down your chin.
Most astonishing is the beef short rib, which has clearly spent a very long time in the smoker until the meat is a deep red and has all but come away from the bone. Then it’s grilled and glazed with a date syrup, until it has a staggering dark crust, revealing first a light layer of fat, just on the edge of melting, and below that the beef. I used to joke that, living in Brixton, I never needed to go to Hackney. For that beef short rib alone I would go again.
What I particularly love is the presentation, or the lack of it. This stuff is plonked on metal trays: here the chicken wings, there the short rib, both layered on more of the bread so it soaks up any juices you haven’t got to. In between are roasted green peppers, petals of blackened onion, heaps of salads and pickles. There’s a little pot of their own cumin salt and another of their harissa paste, which could clean out the sinuses at 20 paces. This is bold, thrilling, nine-napkin food. Some of the individual prices can look steep: £7 for just three of the wings, £12 for six; £9 for a half portion of merguez, £18 for the short rib. But portion sizes are large, and the attention to detail so impressive that it amounts to very good value.
Desserts feel like an afterthought. There is a rose-flavoured panna cotta, and a chocolate and cardamom mousse with a little soured cream. They are things that can be made earlier in the day and piled in the fridge for when necessary. But no one will come out of Berber and Q singing songs about the sweet things. They will talk about the virtuous interplay of smoke and cumin and paprika; of sugar syrups and rose and pomegranate; of great cuts of meat, and sturdy vegetables surrendering themselves to the fire. And if they don’t there is absolutely no bloody justice in this world.
Jay’s news bites
■ For a more straight-up approach to the Levantine tradition, head to the very lovely Dalila Lebanese in Battersea. The room is a little chintzy, but the food is bang on: there’s vibrant fattoush, tabbouleh that’s more green herbs than cracked wheat and exceptionally fine chargrilled meats (dalila.co.uk).
■ Talking about stupendous short ribs, as I just was above, I was recently at Hadskis, a grill house in Belfast, where I tried “sugar pit” short ribs from Peter Hannan’s company the Meat Merchant. Beef short ribs are first dry cured for 14 days before being laid in sugar for the same period. Hannan’s bacon ribs, given a similar treatment, have long been award winners. Available mail order at under £7 a kilo (the meatmerchant.com).
■ VeggieVisionTV, the UK’s only internet-based TV station dedicated to vegetarian and vegan living, surveyed its viewers as to what foods they want to see more vegan versions of. Apparently they wish there was vegan blue cheese. Oh, and vegan Jaffa Cakes. And vegan Maltesers. There aren’t vegan Maltesers? Those poor people.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk
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