The capital’s chefs are embracing open coals and kiln cooking, says

LONDON’S food scene is on fire right now: literally. Chefs are embracing their inner pyromaniacs, rejecting complicated gadgetry in favour of pure, naked flames and the most basic, old-fashioned of tools. That means kilns are in. It turns out that they aren’t just useful for firing pottery at your evening class: they’re also exceptional for cooking in.

They have a no-nonsense appeal, which makes them popular with chefs such as Ben Chapman, revered meat maestro at Thai hotspot Smoking Goat in Denmark Street. His new restaurant, Kiln, on Brewer Street is centred around ... you guessed it.

Chapman is obsessed with the idea of simplicity. Kiln is inspired by the wood-burning roadside clay pots found along the Myanmar border, in which meat is simply blasted with heat and served. He recently returned from Udon in rural east Thailand, researching kiln recipes that “allow ingredients to shine”.

Chapman says kiln-cooking gives the meat a “lightness and delicacy” that’s impossible to achieve otherwise. It’s as easy as firing good, fresh meat into charred perfection. It helps that, as at Smoking Goat, produce is sourced from the impeccably sustainable Cornwall Project.

That means fine meats such as aged hogget [meat from a more than oneyear-old, but not adult, sheep], which Chapman plans to fire in his restaurant’s kiln whole, Szechuan-style.

There’s something intoxicating about watching flames lick around a hunk of lamb or beef, watching as the pink meat develops that sweetly crisp crunch of fire-blasted fat — which is why diners at Kiln will be sitting right in front of the woodburner, drooling in anticipation as the creamy fat on the hogget sizzles, oh-so-simply, into perfection.

Then there’s spit-roasting. When steak restaurant Flat Iron opened its latest branch in Curtain Road, Shoreditch, earlier this month, founder Charlie Carroll insisted on including a two-metre wide, custombuilt spit-roaster — turned by a reclaimed 250-year-old clock mechanism. It’s a nod to history: “Britain is historically famed for roast beef,” says Carroll. “The sort cooked on a spit over radiant heat for a proper length of time. The stuff we eat now is really baked.” Nostalgia aside, it’s the flavour imparted by spit-roasting beef which really makes Carroll excited. “It’s like nothing else: the fat is somehow sweet, there’s a little smokiness but not too much, and slow-cooking means it’s extremely moist.”

The colossal size of the spit-roaster in Shoreditch means they can cook “pretty serious lumps of beef ” — most recently a whole cow leg, weighing about 100kg, hypnotically spun over the flames until mindmeldingly delicious. “It’s real theatre,” says Carroll. Plus you get to eat the star of the show. Win win.

If you have a taste for spit-roasting, go to Berber & Q. At both its new Exmouth Market branch and the original Haggerston site they spitroast top-grade lamb for piling into kebabs. And then there’s the real beef juice-drenched blowout of fire, the Meatopia festival at Tobacco Dock, September 2-4, where dancing naked flames and meat-infused smoke expand your consciousness. So grab the matches and put on The Prodigy: let’s all get firestarting.