Sound the alarm: this Balearic beauty is a grill on fire
I WAS about an hour into my lunch at Mountain — chef Tomos Parry’s spanking new successor to the Michelin-starred Brat — when something that sounded a lot like a fire alarm wailed out. Hunched chefs exchanged looks of concern. Ben Chapman, co-founder of Mountain’s restaurant group Super 8, hurried over to tap at buttons beside the door. Floor staff conferred at a clenched whisper, and generally tried to project serenity in the face of 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.
On the one hand, this felt like a 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 crowd told its own story about the 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. What could have been an easy-money Brat roll-out is, in fact, 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. Mountain really is on fire in more ways than one.
The restaurant (which gets its name and culinary spirit from the mar y montaña cooking that proliferates in Spain’s seaside towns) sits in the vast, two-floored space of a fallen Byron, where louche expansiveness nonetheless points to a definably east London intimacy of spirit.
Raw sobrasada, delivered by Parry himself, brought iPhone-thick slices of the spiced sausage and little toasts (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 chillies, 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. If Parry, a proud son of Anglesey with cherubic features, has a legacy, then it has been to turn glamorous urbanites onto the sort of primeval, rustic pleasures that would delight a Basque fisherman. These large-format platters are present and correct.
Not just the roiling, signature, 3-4 person lobster caldereta, but also a magnificent whole John Dory, 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 the wine). But it was the hidden complexity in so many dishes — the 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 Majorcan ensaimada pastry — that consistently took my breath away. Later, I asked Parry if the issue with the fire alarm had been resolved. “Alarm?” he said as more guests squeezed through the door and harnessed flames rose in the wood oven behind him. “I didn’t hear an alarm.”