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.
This is all doubly impressive, considering how early I visited. Shuffling into its Beak Street site last week, on only the fourth proper day of trading, the perceptible shift in atmosphere among a crammed room of Super 8 management, off-duty chefs come to pay homage, and at least one beloved soap actress, was such that I might as well have been blasting The Imperial March from a boombox.
Mountain (which gets its name and culinary spirit from the mar y montaña cooking that proliferates in Spain’s hilly seaside towns) sits in the vast, two-floored space of a fallen Byron, where louche expansiveness — think decorative regiments of spent wine bottles, a towering basement soundsystem and two Gozney wood ovens, grimacing flame, in kitchens that are not so much open as wholly porous — nonetheless points to a definably East London intimacy of spirit.
Raw sobrasada, delivered by Parry himself, brought iPhone-thick slices of the spiced sausage (from an organic Mallorcan farmer called Luis Cirera) and little oblongs of toast (born from the wood-fired breads created by head baker Suzi Mahon and consultant dough-whisperer Pamela Yung) transformed, via a trickle of honey and some slivered guindilla peppers, into three crunching bites of unimprovable, piquant genius. Fat, bisected commas of sweet, raw scarlet prawn — set in a spill of fresh cheese like the gooey heart of some idealised, fantasy burrata — repeated the trick with surf rather than turf. Scorch-edged, creamy-middled beef sweetbreads were only slightly hampered by the textural challenge of woody violet artichokes.
There is a magnetic, tactile sensuousness to so much of the food that consistently took my breath away
If Parry, a proud son of Anglesey with cherubic features and a rock frontman’s flopping fringe, has a legacy, then it has been to turn glamorous urbanites onto the sort of primeval, rustic pleasures that would delight a vermut-burping Basque fisherman. These large-format platters are present and correct. Not just the roiling, signature, three to four person lobster calderata (which we did not have the manpower for) but, also, a magnificent whole John Dory, burnished by the plancha and glimmering beneath a luminescent pil-pil sauce, or a chicken stock-anointed pan of crackly, wood-fired rice that makes your eyes involuntarily screw shut in the manner of a reclining toy doll.
There is a magnetic, tactile sensuousness to so much of the food (ditto a wine list characterfully split by theme as much as grape variety). However, it was the hidden complexity in so many dishes — the extraordinary housemade curd and girolle mix anchoring brightly citric grilled vine leaves; the rich, pork fat sheen and intricate, whorled crumb structure of a conclusive slice of Mallorcan ensaimada pastry — that consistently took my breath away. That the kitchen team’s approach is so shortcut-averse and lacking in ego, that its process-heavy creations look like food rather than unearthly blobs and smears, is what makes it all so rousing, so unforgettable and, yes, so deserving of the fuss and attention currently engulfing it.
Later on, I asked Parry if the issue with the fire alarm had been resolved. “Alarm?” he said, with a playful smile, as more guests squeezed through the door and flames rose in the wood oven behind him. “I didn’t hear an alarm.”
