When a place such as Mountain opens, I can almost hear the grinding teeth of rival restaurateurs, because every new Tomos Parry restaurant creates a gasping hubbub that you cannot manufacture or pay for. Parry rarely appears on TV, he doesn’t have a string of cookbooks, neither does he go on tour, as James Martin does, and play Money For Nothing on an electric guitar between recipe demos (the fervour around Parry’s breakthrough restaurant, Brat in Shoreditch, would have allowed it, though). Instead, somewhere among the Basque-style turbot, the smoked potatoes and the wobbly cheesecake, diners and food critics alike developed a deep respect for Parry. It wasn’t hype, either: Brat is exemplary. Four years after opening, it is still the place to get a table, especially if you want to signal to your guest: “I know what I am doing.”
And now we have Mountain in Soho, a bigger space set over two floors, with more cooking on fire, more muted, industrial-rustic decor, more painstakingly sourced ingredients such as ex-dairy beef and sobrassada. The menu is a tad more experimental, though, with Tamworth sow collar, turbot head and cull yaw chops, as well as beef sweetbreads with violet artichokes, spider crab omelette and nutty walnut bread with peach and bottarga, which is one of the most delicious things I’ve eaten this year. Would I, of my own volition, layer wafer-thin slices of ripe peach on to walnut bread and add pungent, salty, smoked fish roe? No, it sounds horrific. But the fact that it is entirely the opposite is the whole point of putting on some shoes and eating outside your own house.
