Smoking Goat Shoreditch

Bar, Thai Grill, Meat, Seafood & Claypots, Redchurch St, Shoreditch and Denmark St, Soho

SMOKING GOAT | Shoreditch | Bar & Thai Grill, Redchurch St, Shoreditch

http://www.smokinggoatbar.com

A First Look at Shoreditch's Most Ambitious New Bar and Restaurant ...

The interior Chef Ali Borer, centre Comfort food “Larger plates” The showpiece dish is, appropriately, a smoked, barbecued goat and turmeric massaman curry.

The rich, slow-grilled goat meat comes hidden beneath an aromatic sauce made from coconut husk, peanut, long red dry chilli, bay, white cardamom, cassia bark, cinnamon, clove and cumin.

Goat massaman curry Elsewhere in this section is the soya-braised chicken dish — a combination of Chinese and Thai flavours.

Soya braised chicken Seafood d’tom yum is an interpretation of the hot and sour Thai soup, which blurs the boundaries between a broth and a curry.

Larbs — dry aromatic fries, using the liver and heart of a duck; or heart from rare breed cattle in Cornwall (“Jungle style kra pow”), come after sticky, marinated and barbecued pork-and-pork-fat skewers (from on-site-butchered Tamworth pigs) or a northern-style Thai beef and turmeric sausage with hot mint.

Fay Maschler Questions the Value of Authenticity at the New ...

As Thai-American chef Kris Yenbamroong has recently articulated, the word “authentic”, in certain contexts, leads to a weird arms race — restaurants and diners one-upping each other to find the least-white, least-Western menu item and herald it as the most authentic expression of Thai / Sichuan / Maldivian food.

And so it is timely for Maschler to be visiting the new Smoking Goat — to highlight how the melamine plates and bowls “contrast oddly” with the setting’s “handsome sturdy wooden fixtures and fittings”; to note how the “forbidding” front door and front-of-house welcome jars with the restaurant’s purported inspiration (late-night Bangkok canteens); to lament how fealty to a higher cause dictates that the way the food is served and garnished renders it occasionally “fundamentally unapproachable.”

The East London Liquor Company is a distillery first, and bar / restaurant second, so hopes are high for the cocktails on an “intriguing” list.

This one seems to have tried to cram them all under one roof: the description posted online runs “illiterately but with gusto” across multiple sentences, box-ticking items from any manner of flights of fantasy as well as promising to be “an authentic Chinese bar, small plates restaurant and barbecue destination” which also “specialises in hot pots.”

Anyone familiar with his review of the Lovecraftian Egg Master will know Samadder can be laceratingly funny; in his first crack at the restaurant reviewing gig he turns out to be another inspired call-up from the subs bench (even if food editor Bob Gran-Leith announced him three days early.)

Review: Smoking Goat, Shoreditch - No Mean Feast

Smoking Goat, Shoreditch: restaurant review | Foodism

The closure of Ben Chapman's much-loved Smoking Goat on Denmark Street had many a Thai food fan up in arms, but the opening of a bigger site in Shoreditch last winter has softened the blow.

After that, there are London craft beers aplenty and a succinct and new-school wine list put together by blogger and all-round food guy Zeren Wilson – which veers, as you might imagine from the flavours of the food on offer, between refreshingly flinty, zesty white wine and the more aromatic side of the scale.

At Smoking Goat, you're in the 'food so hot it makes you delirious' realm (as you'd expect from an alumnus of David Thompson's iconic Bangkok restaurant Nahm) – none of which, we should point out, feels gratuitous.

For mains, the whole steamed sea bass, laced with aromatic spice, is a real treat, and the massaman goat curry – redolent with a punch of muscovado sweetness to complement its lazy heat – is a must-order.

Smoking Goat is dead; long live Smoking Goat.

Smoking Goat Shoreditch: Review

The original Smoking Goat, on Denmark Street, was for many the moment when Thai food came of age in the capital.

If this seems dismissive of the generations of Thai chefs and restaurateurs who came before, then we don’t mean it to; of course there were good Thai restaurants in London, but they tended to be high-end places like the Patara mini-chain, and of course David Thompson’s Nahm – each well worth the effort, but special occasion places; hardly somewhere you’d pop in for a bite to eat and a beer.

Chicken heart skewers (a quid a pop) were bouncy and full of flavour, served in an obscure powdered Thai spice that had an effect closer to the tingle of Sichuan peppercorns than chilli heat.

The use of top-end British ingredients and Thai techniques was what made the original branch a success, and it’s abundantly clear that just as much effort has gone into the menu in Shoreditch.

And if you were thinking that Smoking Goat may have been tempted to dial down the chilli to better appease their new East London market, then you need to try their duck laab, a dish so searingly spicy it brought our entire table to tears.

Smoking Goat Shoreditch: Ambitious twist on Thai goes east ...

John is mad about Kiln in Brewer Street and Max digs Smoking Goat in Denmark Street — actually, I feel much the same way — Soho restaurants that are in the same ownership as this conversion of what was a family-run pub, The White Horse, where strippers once stripped.

“Nu-Thai” is what the cool kids call it, I am told, food from white boys who have travelled widely in South-East Asia, read studiously their copies of Andy Ricker’s Pok Pok: The Drinking Food of Thailand and touched the hem of David Thompson — who could be said to have started it all at Darley Street Thai in Sydney.

Northern Thai-style beef sausage is judged soggier and less vivid than the smoked sausage with turmeric at Kiln, the establishment that is invoked and praised more than once for comparative precision of preparation.

At dinner, the best of what we try is smoked brisket drunken noodles, where flavours in the slippery, shiny mass sing out distinctly and call for another bottle of wine from the beguiling list compiled by Zeren Wilson, in this instance Petit Verdot 2015 released grudgingly — it is a small harvest bottled unfiltered — from Mornington Peninsula, Australia, by Bill Downie.

Another is for someone in or out of the kitchen to control the flow but this may well be contrary to Bangkok canteen spirit… D’tom yam wild mussels velvet crab has a haunting stock but the metal bowl is crowded with items that are fundamentally unapproachable — huge, hard chunks of ginger, chopped up swimming crab (once considered a pest) with no means of excavation, whole chillies, large slices of Bangladeshi limes.