Uncork these BBQ beauties
THE DISH POGOES MERRILY AROUND THE MOUTH
Scully 4 St James’s Market, London SW1Y 4AH for the food for St James’s Market
CHICKPEAS. A small bowl of them, warm and just firm. Scented with curry leaves, a fat grunt of chilli and a pert citrus kick. The spicing is sublime: Madhya Pradesh small-town street corner, 40 years in the business, eternal queues, chana masala wallah good. It’s one of those dishes that belt the words clean out of one’s gob, transforming dumbstruck, awed silence into the broadest of silly grins. Two cynical restaurant critics, so delighted by these lovely legumes that the usual flow of lurid gossip is brought temporarily to a halt. Yup, that good. A dish of strippedback, almost primal simplicity that manages to be both subtle and bold. As first impressions go, it’s lust as first sight.
Because Ramael Scully is one hell of a cook, no doubt about that. Maybe it’s something to do with being born in Malaysia and raised in Sydney, to a mother of Chinese/ Indian descent, and an Irish/ Balinese father. The sort of crosscultural roots of which most chefs can but dream. Or the six years spent as head chef at Yotam Ottolenghi’s Nopi, a place where cuisines are swapped and shared with the same merry abandon as a Surrey Swingers’ ball. Or a surfeit of pulsing raw talent, with a palate paved in gold. Probably, though, it’s a combination of them all.
Sometimes, his dishes feel like some vast and noisy culinary sound clash, which could, in lesser hands, jar. Puffed beef tendon, like a huge, crisp bovine Quaver, comes with a cool, luscious oyster mayonnaise and an intense, umami-drenched, Thai prik-like tomato dip. A beautifully cooked piece of monkfish, muscular, firm and pure, comes topped with a splodge of honking, intensely fishy, lustily spicy sambal belacan, the sort you’d find in a Malay food court, with all the rough edges left very much intact. It sits in a splendid and lip-puckeringly sour broth that takes me back to Sri Lankan shores. Vegetables are treated with equal aplomb – charred ‘white sprouting’ broccoli comes enveloped in a thick, rich hug of salted egg yolk sauce, the sharp slap of Chinese black vinegar there to stop things getting too hot and heavy. And just when things seem overwhelmingly big, bold and booming, he pulls back and delivers the most elegant and delicate of pea and broad bean salads, with cumulus-light ricotta and pickled smoky aubergine, and the nimblest of dressings that gathers it all together. Then an early-season tomato salad, with shards of fresh coconut and green strawberries, packed with unexpected flavour, and drenched in a sour sweet tomato ‘shrub’ that demands to be slurped. The whole dish pogoes merrily around the mouth, a fruit reveille wake-up call.
Not everything thrills. It rarely does. Deep-fried baby artichokes are decent, but the black shallot aioli, while looking suitably gothic, lacks an allium punch. While shortrib pastrami is wonderfully peppery, and a fine piece of cured meat, but the pistachio pesto stuff is cloying. Still, there’s so much more to try. Halibut, wild garlic, vadouvan for a start. Service is charming, if occasionally a little too enthusiastic. I don’t much like being called ‘my friend.’ Even by my friends. Especially by my friends.
The room is pleasant enough, with its shelves crammed with sauces, fish and soy, a pile of classic cookbooks and endless jars filled with fermented this and pickled that. Although, with its open kitchen, blond wood, exposed vents and tattooed forearms, it is little different from its ilk, east London, Brighton and Bristol alike. There’s the usual vast fridge in the corner, too, with a glass door – a sexy side of beef on one side, and the biggest monkfish I’ve ever seen, a brute of a beast winking its wanton wares. Not unlike the red light district of Amsterdam.
So why am I not totally besotted by the place? Scully is a rare talent, and I can’t wait to eat more of his food. He runs a tight ship too.
Nope, the problem is where it sits, in the desolate St James’s Market, the culinary equivalent of Dredd’s Cursed Earth.
This is the dead zone, no man’s land, a contrived confection of a new London square, a place where great restaurants (Ikoyi) sit criminally underused, and others (Veneta) merely slip away into oblivion. He has to get out, before it’s too late. The food may be fantastic, but this place will devour your soul. About £45 per head