Despite a rule that good writing shouldn't start with the weather, we are British and it's HAWT. Summer and especially these unprecedented weeks require a nibble-mentality, a carrion-like pecking, elegantly extending one claw to prong an unsuspecting morsel… I think I've taken the metaphor far enough but guess what mountain range is cresting in the distance right as if on cue.
The misty Appalachia. Stretching from Southern New York to Northern Mississippi, they encompass 423 counties across 13 US states and are home to over 26 million people. This is obviously not the real stony spine, but a restaurant rising slightly less majestically but prettily on the corner of Nile Street in Shoreditch.
Great British Menu contestant, and ex-Smoking Goat chef Ali Borer is not a wispy-bearded North Carolinian as hoped for but a neat-bearded Welshman. However, his approach to the vast mid-Atlantic region and the diverse blend of culinary references is to refine and refocus: seasonality, homemade and changing old-world influences: Welsh, Scottish, Irish and English, and then set that all on fire (smoke and flame are kind of his thing).
Inside a green-walled room, a swathe of moss-tinted marble agglomerates around an open kitchen. If you don't like making eye contact with a sous chef as you tell your friend about your recent STD acquirement, there is a newly built (if slightly less chic) outdoor area in those life-and-death transmitting rays.
Now there are mains, obviously, glorious but weighty sounding mains. Pimento cheeseburgers, crab omelettes, pork chops and half a chicken, but we couldn't do it, they all seem like they would delight and drown us. Yet there are four single snack dishes and eight starters, and so we set about sampling, fingers darting down like herons' beaks at the innocent minnows below.
British oysters in a sea of oily Chow Chow (a sweet and tangy pickled relish made from chopped end-of-season garden vegetables: green tomatoes, cabbage, onions, bell pepper) is a sure-fire way to wake your lips up. Hillbilly loaf comes inwardly brioched, but glazed and hard on the outside almost like a bread egg to crack and dip in the cultured apple butter, like solidified cider. Tongue & Head (which part is kept elusive) is a tender pork skewer that you'll fight over if you don't get two. Oyster sauce clings to the crusted meat that then flakes apart most snafflingly.
Blessedly cold is the beef tartare on layers of tostada like a raw meat cake, but more appetising. The pickled cucumber and lime combine for a heat and that odd arousing carcass wrongness. A kilt salad (kilt is animal fat mixed in) is a wasabi (though not too much), sodden swamp of leaves, mustard miso salad cream clumping the sods of watery flavour together fantastically.
Rabbit is served in such an inventive way, instead of rubbered in a stew or sauce we have it breaded and fried, on a bed of garlicky and tomatoey green beans. It's like chicken leg but better, deeper and closer to duck, but then also deer and somehow calamari, this long-forgotten meat is given life, or should I say prominence, under Borer's watchful eyes.
Duck hearts are little balls of love, hot sauce drizzling over, pickled onion salad next door as sweet as they come, fling them up into the sky and right down your feathered gullet. Sausages with blue cheese slaw, tomato and courgette salads or a mushroom potlikker (a nutrient-rich broth left behind in the pot after boiling leafy greens) or charred corn are also available for a poke and stroke.
Two dessert helpings mean you must have both: a rather gimmicky popping-candy-encrusted banana pudding, with enough Biscoff to take your enamel off, and a peach and rhubarb dish that would certainly shout from the pealing veranda "come on in for supper boys, I've made my special cobbler for youse, come get it while it's warrrmmm", and warm it is.
Stretching like grilled frogs over the chairs outside, sipping an olive and Jin Jin (fermented blackcurrant cordial) and hot green tomato cocktail, then a nightcap Old Fashioned and Paloma, Kool-Aid Collins and then a sparkling tea, we were drunk… on the evening's subtle majesty. I've never seen the mighty mountains but hope to do so. Borer and the team have refined a melting pot, cherry picking the best bits and serving them up without stereotype and with plenty of ignition, bringing another corner of this big wide world seamlessly to our doorstep.
Appalachia
71 Nile Street
N1 7RD
