I was about an hour into my lunch at Mountain — chef Tomos Parry’s spanking new, instantly thronged successor to the Michelin-starred Brat — when something that sounded a lot like a fire alarm started to wail out over the hubbub of a bustling service. Hunched chefs exchanged momentary looks of concern; Ben Chapman, co-founder of Mountain’s restaurant group Super 8, hurried over to frantically tap at buttons on an alarm console beside the door; floor staff conferred at a clenched whisper, and generally tried to project calm serenity in the face of palpable, mounting panic. And then, after barely a minute, the alarm stopped. Order was restored. Diners, most of whom had not so much as motioned for jackets or halted their conversations, continued with their Menai Straits oysters and their silken spider crab omelettes and their puffed zeppelins of grill-fired bread.
Yes, on the one hand, this felt like an unignorable gift from the column-writing gods; a moment when the smoking-hot status of one of the year’s most fervently anticipated restaurant openings edged from the figurative to the literal. But I mention it because the inaction of the assembled crowd told its own story about the food and experience here. Which is to say, bluntly, that this is a restaurant where not even the implicit threat of a fiery demise will be enough to drag you away. It is a bold, brooding expansion of Parry’s signature, Basque-accented approach; a smoke-wreathed pleasuredome, oriented around rugged Balearic landscapes, and fittingly predicated on oceanic flavour depth and cloud-skimming technical brilliance. Believe the hype, then. Mountain really is on fire in more ways than one.
