Smoke & Salt restaurant review, Tooting Broadway, London

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Smoke and Salt restaurant started life as a pop-up in a shipping container, and I am delighted that this cosy, vibrant restaurant with its stylish black frontage made a permanent home in Tooting Broadway in South West London.

Smoke & Salt was founded by Aaron Webster, formerly a chef de partie at Dinner by Heston and the Nigeria-born and highly charismatic Remi Williams, who studied at the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts in Boston. Together they have crafted the culinary delights on their menu using techniques such as brining, curing, salting and fermenting – hence the name Smoke & Salt.

Decor is a pleasing mix of rustic and modern industrial with dark floors, part brick walls and wood tables, and an open kitchen where you can, as we did, sit on a stool and watch the chefs banter and prepare the food – a sort of culinary entertainment.

So perched with anticipation on our stools by the open kitchen, we began our culinary adventure with their Culture Tasting Menu priced at £70 per person. This may seem a fair wack, but for this extensive and unique 12-course menu, it is actually superb value for money.

The calvacade of food starts with homemade pretzels served with butter whipped with smoked beef from the fat of beef sirloin (served later). Having seen the extent of the menu. I knew better than to completely devour these delicious but rather large pretzels. 

Beetroot tartlets followed. These had been cooked over charcoal and charred, then diced and dressed with a homemade aubergine-lime with confit egg yolk and were surprisingly tasty.

Then tempura-fried kale seasoned with onion and fennel seeds, seaweed and white pepper, then glazed with a craberry and fermented chilli sambal.

Trimchi Pancake comprises a mix of various vegetable trim, the stuff that would ordinarily be thrown out, but here it is made into a kimchi, fried and glazed with a gochujang honey and homemade kewpie-style mayo. Pretty vibrant flavours dancing on the palate.

What followed next was an incredible slice of meaty monkfish served on a risotto. 

A meaty BBQ monkfish is brined for three hours, left to dry to develop a pellicle on the surface and is served on a walnut and barley risotto finished with walnut milk, cherry vinegar and butter.

The butternut squash finished the line-up of the first part of the menu. It is cooked char-siu style with a lavender and tamari glaze. The sauces on the bottom are brown butter hollandaise, a pumpkin seed nduja and the dish is finished with pickled quince and shiso

By now, we were heady with flavours and interesting concoctions, and yet there was plenty more to come.

A 40-day Aged beef striploin, with beef fat doughnuts, sumac and pink peppercorn pickled onions, was succulent and simply superb. The meat came from an Angus & Hereford cross-breed, sourced from Walter Rose and Tim from Stokes Marsh Farm in Coulston, Wiltshire.

The offcuts and trim from the sirloin, as well as braised beef tendon and tongue, were used to produce the ragu that the dish is served with, to make a rich, sweet, sticky sauce for the dish. It is finished with bronzed fennel, garlic chives and apple marigold with plenty of visual appeal.

This was followed by three more tasting dishes, a poached chicken that had been seasoned with dill and oregano. It is served with BBQ onions and a bonfire mayonnaise, an aged chalkstream trout that was cured and pan-roasted and served with BBQ onions and a bonfire mayonnaise. And finally, treacle and marmite-roasted parsnips served with BBQ onions and a bonfire mayonnaise.

We downed our sorbet palate cleanser and waited a short while before tucking into a sumptuous pumpkin-spiced tiramisu. Theirs is a twist on this Italian classic of lady fingers soaked in an espresso and coffee liquor mix. These are then sandwiched and layered around a mascarpone pate flavoured with homemade pumpkin-spice mix (a better version of the Starbucks classic). The tiramisu was finalised with a dusting of cocoa powder over the top and then finished with crystallised pumpkin seeds and a splash of pumpkinseed oil to cut the sweetness of the rest of the dessert.

And finally, and not that we needed it, but a plate of treats to go with my herbal tea of fudge, ganache pate de fruit, melon seed brittle and honeycomb.

VERDICT

Though a vibrant part of London, Tooting Broadway may not be a destination in itself, but the Smoke & Salt restaurant is most certainly worth the diversion. This magnificent culinary adventure is one I hope to experience again in the coming months as their menu changes seasonally. Frankly, I would be missing out if I didn’t.