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.
A salad of cucumbers, peeled, roughly chopped and served in a tangle of mountain mint and bergamot, was delicious, eventually, but initially rather odd. Never fear, though: Parry’s famous fire-smoked potatoes are here, too, all crunchy yet soft, waxy, irresistible and, if you’re not an adventurer, highly accessible. You can share four-year-old Jersey sirloin for £30 a head or, for a bit more, eight-year-old friesian beef rib, both cooked on the fire, both rare and both fabulous, especially with those spuds and Clos Culombu Corsican red at £9 a glass, although I stuck to a Botivo spritz, which is the closest no-alcohol drink you can get to a proper adult tipple in any bar right now.
Mountain, of course, is in many ways not Brat: for a start, it’s in Soho, where rumours of an economic downturn haven’t touched the top echelons of ad-land and expense accounts are still being audibly or, more accurately, loquaciously rinsed. It was a Friday, and table-hopping, back-slapping and memories of Tuscany were in full swing within a metre of my fishy peach bread. I won’t wish that such people would disappear – after all, they are the customers who are keeping large, fancy restaurants serving good produce afloat, especially ones such as this, where it’s £8 for a langoustine, £26 for a plate of sweetbreads and £10 for a side of lettuce with anchovy.
It’s a spacious setting in a building that was once home to Murray’s, a private cabaret club where Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies were hostesses. Now, possibly in the exact same spot where Keeler once draped herself over a Conservative minister, there is a small, in-house bakery earnestly churning out loaves, soft and crunchy in all the right places, to serve festooned with fresh cheese and raw prawns, or to smear through the oil on a plate of braised summer vegetables (peppers, carrots, courgettes, green beans). Mountain’s sheer size, however, also means it is rather loud. Eventually, the restaurant landscape will split into two groups: people such as myself who damaged their hearing in the 1980s watching Ragga Twins at Rezerection all-nighters, and younger diners with working ears who can eat their dinner in a big, echoey room without resorting to lip-reading.
I shouldn’t finish without giving special mention to the dessert menu, because it’s both complex and surprising, which are two words rarely used in pudding-land these days. Ensaimada, a sweet, fluffy, traditional Mallorcan pastry, came with peaches, and do leave room for the torrija, which is essentially a slice of fried brioche-and-butter pudding with custard, and plump, glossy blackberries, or brambles as we called them when I was a child. Swimming in wild brambles we were back then; now, though, like so much fruit, they’re an expensive treat. Which may also explain why Mountain’s ice-creams and sorbets are on the pricey side, though I can say beyond doubt that they are some of the best being made in London right now. The blackcurrant sorbet was particularly mesmerising, and they also had honey melon and strawberry on that day; the ice-cream choice was olive oil, ricotta, cherry and whey caramel.
In fact, on a future visit, I may well go straight to the pudding section and work my way through that, because another table’s red gooseberries with whitecurrant semifreddo caused me a fair bit of 3am sadness. Mountain is buzzy, delicious, destination dining in the middle of Soho. It’s also further evidence that Tomos Parry really knows what he’s doing.
Mountain 16-18 Beak Street, London W1, bookings@mountainbeakstreet.com. Open lunch Tues-Sun, noon-2.30pm (3.30pm Fri & Sat, 5pm Sun), dinner Tues-Sat, 5-9.30pm (last orders). From about £55 a head, plus drinks and service
Grace Dent’s new book, Comfort Eating: What We Eat When No One Is Looking, is published in October by Guardian Faber at £20. To pre-order a copy for £16, go to guardianbookshop.com
