Giles Coren reviews Rök/Smokestak

Yup, barbecuing is a damned labour-intensive business, which is why the Corens have given up trying. We had thought, what with me having a short beard and my wife having one tattoo, that we might be able to manage it. But we’re just not up to the task.

Smokestak

I’m not talking about simple old-fashioned suburban barbecue here, where you wheel out the Weber, buy a couple of racks of pre-sauced pork ribs from the butcher, light a small heap of charcoal, close the lid and come back 20 minutes later for a delicious, smoky outdoors meal of sweet, unctuous flesh with minimal washing-up. Oh no. Where’s the fun in that?

I’m talking about proper, vocational modern caveman cooking of whole joints over wood, which is what we have been trying and miserably failing to achieve this year.

Oh, the hours I have put in. First, I earned the money to buy the converted barn with enough space to graze the sheep. That took around 15 years. Then I built the oven myself from a couple of old stone benches and a 1973 Mercedes radiator grill. I chopped the wood. I dug the pit. I had a guy kill and butcher the white-face woodland ewe who wasn’t lambing very well, I rubbed the 22lb shoulder with garlic and rosemary and chilli and salt and left it for nearly a week to ripen.

Then I got up early, lit the huge wood fire, waited for it to burn down to coals and raked them into the pit under the grill, then stacked up more logs to burn down to replace them, then heaved the gargantuan shoulder onto the grill to gently smoke it, low and slow, until it would collapse over flatbreads and slaw for all my hungry, laughing, fashionable friends.

Except that I didn’t get up early enough – either time I tried it – to give my friends anything to put on their flatbreads at all.

I did everything right: settled the meat at the proper height for the correct surface temperature, observed the exponential rise of the internal heat with a good thermometer, legislated for the five to six hours everyone told me it would take, cooked it past the rare point of a hot roast (carving off a couple of slices to check for juicy deliciousness and getting it), then on past the cooked-through stage, when it is briefly tight and tough and useless and then …

The “stall”. That’s what they call it. Where for no reason the internal heat suddenly stops rising some way before that temperature where you know the meat will fall deliciously away from the bone, all marbled with sticky yellow fat and blackened at the sugary ends.

This was around 1pm. Fully seven hours after I’d started the fire. People were starting to tuck napkins in their necks, children were holding their plates out to me. Another hour, I told them. And then another. At 3pm, my wife said we’d have to eat at some point and I screamed at her that at this stage it would still taste like shoes. Which was when people started eating the bread and salads on their own.

At 4pm, with the temperature still stalled, I threw 20 chops from the same animal onto the grill (it’s a big grill) and 5 minutes later everyone was tearing into perfect, charred, rare, juicy mutton and asking why I hadn’t just served this in the first place.

“Because it’s not proper barbecue!” I shouted. “It’s too easy!”

And grimly I sat on, drinking harder, staring at the thermometer wedged in the gargantuan joint, willing it to rise. But it never did. Whether it was the cooling breeze passing over the meat (the experts had all warned me off covering it) or something inept in my very soul, it just never got there. As night fell and the guests headed off, I began shouting, “Stay for supper!” and carving huge slabs of overdone, but not collapsing, slices off the joint.

“Wait!” I cried as they headed for their cars. “Let me chop it down – it’ll make awesome shepherd’s pie.”

And it did. And it kept us going for weeks, paying back some of the several hundred thousand pounds I had invested in it. So if you’re looking for barbecuing advice from me, I say this: go to Rök or Smokestak.

At the former, in a small Victorian building in Shoreditch that is spookily dwarfed by the empty spaces of the vast towers soon to be erected all around it, you will find possibly the only Swedish barbecue in London. It is odourless, white-washed and woody in a Scandi-meets-hipster way and its new summer menu is quite delightful.

There are eye-opening pickles, such as fennel & wild garlic and cucumber & gin, served in, I think, not jam but herring jars. Little scotch quail’s eggs of beef and pepperoni are rich and porky with pungent parsley mayo; perfect hot alder-smoked salmon is served on a sweetish salad of charred broccoli, quinoa and seeds; a wedge of Iceberg under ansjovis mayo and crispy onions has a pleasingly Burger Kingy tang to it and a salad of heirloom tomatoes is at perfect ripeness (so often one is dazzled by tomato varieties of such unusual colour and shape that one assumes their awful crunchiness must be deliberate and desirable – which I doubt it ever is) with crayfish skagen (a more refined, Nordic version of a prawn cocktail). And finally there is a smoked pulled pork open sandwich in which the meat was a little dry. But I’m not going to take them up on it. At least they got it out to me before nightfall.

With all that inside me, I nipped round the corner for a crack at Smokestak, a permanent home for the barbecue genius David Carter, who plied his incredible trade previously at the streetfood meccas Dalston Yard, Hawker House and Dinerama (in which I have a small financial interest though they don’t let me near the cooking).

From both inside and outside, the site verges on hipster pastiche, with its hammered iron surfaces and rough wood apparently torn from the primal forest and hurled willy-nilly at the walls. The tables look like they’ve been made out of Odin’s bike shed and there’s a thing like a dispensary cabinet but so rough-hewn it might have been carved by beavers. There is a sense of being on the set of the ghastly new King Arthur movie, or below decks on The Black Pearl.

And then comes black crockery and you’re thinking, “Oh come on, be serious.” But then you taste the delicate sliced raw sea bream with grapefruit and fiery jalapeño on it and you think, “Ah, you ARE serious!”

And you think the same over immaculate cubes of fried, slow-roasted ox cheek, deep purple and with its fat and fibre perfectly balanced, with scattered sea salt and aïoli and a frosted glass of Kernel Table Beer.

And then strips of barbecued chicken on flatbread with garlic sauce, beautifully cut slaw and an explosive chilli salsa. (Oh my mutton lunch would have been SO nice …)

Then Carter’s famous brisket with a tangle of pickled red chilli slices. The best in the world: two strips, blackened at the rim, with a sugary snap to it and yet every cell retaining its fat so no dryness at all – that perfect balance that almost no barbecue joints or middle-aged men at their Cotswolds barns ever manage to get right.

Two thick-cut pork ribs, weighty and fat, with pickled cucumbers and finally two big chunks of monkfish, lightly crumbed, on the bone, light and crunchy, with a burnt lemon – weird but presumably deliberate.

Rök is good but Smokestak is great, truly great and a wondrous thing to have found. Because this stuff, as I believe I might have already said, is not easy to do.

Rök
26 Curtain Road, London EC2 (020 7377 2152; roklondon.co.uk)
Score: 7
Price: £4-£10 a dish – absolutely stunning value

Smokestak
35 Sclater Street, London E1 (020 3873 1733; smokestak.co.uk)
Score: 8
Price: £6-£15 a dish – also excellent value