Impala

Everybody wants to talk about Impala. I just want to make the bad dad joke about Bambi’s vampire cousin*.

It’s routinely described as North African influenced and, indeed, column inches have been spent in discussing whether Impala represents the start of a trend. Christ, it’s desperate, isn’t it? Are we really that drooling to know where the herd is heading, or are magazines just aching to be seen as leading us.

Repeat after me.

One is a happenstance

Two is coincidence

… You need three for a trend.

Meedu Saad, the brain behind Impala was born in Tottenham to a mum from Chicago with parents from England and Poland. His dad was from Ismailia - though some of the ample advance publicity for Impala talks about inspiration from ‘Cairo Markets’.

I don’t mean to sound flippant, but the truth is that Saad’s genius lies not, as we’d all love to report, in his interesting ethnicity, but rather the phenomenal talent of an international kid, to effortlessly fuck with it.

The way we talk about restaurants and the origins of their cuisine has become, to be honest, completely screwed in countervailing currents of culture warfare, authenticity, appropriation, and what can and can’t be claimed in the all important back story/origin myth of every new restaurant. I can’t understand why every PR and restaurateur with a new project doesn’t just throw open their window, hang out and with one voice shout ‘It’s Just a Fucking Restaurant and I’m not going to take it anymore’.

Aish Baladi, is brought to the table with full ceremony and a backstory. It’s been the bread of all classes of Egyptian society since they were building pyramids and, to be honest, it looks like it. Small, round and sprinkled with echt grains and chaff. I can’t work out if it’s a loaf or a parable. But then you rip the bugger open and it’s soft, airy and full of nutty complexity. All the ingredients of a European health/punishment loaf somehow turned into a little fat cloud of joy. It would be sacrilege to apply it to any form of dip. Maybe that is the parable.

Kibbeh appears across the Levant as a pounded paste of, usually, meat and bulghur. Saad does something similar with raw Scottish langoustine and sun dried wheat, which he then wraps in a rigorously East or South Asian Perilla leaf, bringing it somewhat into temaki-zushi territory. And why the hell not? His most recent success has been Kiln, the restaurant so famously authentic to Northern Thailand that it cooks only over charcoal and is staffed entirely by posh English kids on gap years.

Our brilliant server was very keen we should try the raw brill with mashua root, dressed with garum and wild honey. Mashua, in case, like me, you wondered, is an Andean tuber, looking a bit like a Jerusalem artichoke and related to the nasturtium. The brill had been hung in an ageing cabinet, achieving tightness but stopping blessedly short real funk. (There’s a Donald Fagen joke here, but it’ll take a braver geek than me to go there).

Beef tartare will henceforth always be made with Djerban harissa. I won’t be taking questions on that.

I’m coming back for the ftira, with a nine martini hangover. Let’s parse this little beauty. It’s a doughnut, kind of smashed flat and with a ‘hen’s’ egg cracked into it before deep frying. It puffs up like a liferaft while the egg fries (to runny, obvs) and then they top it with dollops of harissa. It’s a gorgeous thing and I really want to watch one being fried in a market somewhere because, truth is, this is a real streetfood banger that, while delicious, sits uneasily amongst the more refined starters. I want my street food tasting of the fat it fried in, possibly watching the paper bag go transparent before scalding my palate ’till shreds of skin hang down from the roof of my mouth like torn curtains and the yolk dribbles down to gild my beard. Just maybe not while forking out for what I’m told is “the hottest table in Soho right now”.

Sheftalia, is a Cypriot sausage/faggot, which Saad makes out of impeccable Tamworth pork and wraps authentically in caul fat. It’s served with an ‘off-menu’ harissa that’s smokier and darker than the usual stuff and all the better for it. I was two thirds of the way down the second bottle of Nebbiolo at this point, so my note taking was sketchy. I’ve written ‘maDe b jewish MOnks!!!’, but you’d better not hold me to that.

Duck roasted in molasses with fig sauce is even better than le tout de londres is saying. The skin is part of the treat and, possibly because it’s the only cuisine I haven’t been able to reference yet, I’d say it had a touch of Chinese influence to it. The skin isn’t quite candied ‘Peking’ style, but it’s lacquered-up good-and-proper - to the extent you suspect the skin might be what it’s all about. To accompany (because I’m still afraid of my mother) I ordered a ‘Heap of blanched greens and herbs with tomato, olive oil and lemon’, but mainly I face-planted into the pilaf. Green with herbs, bejewelled with barberries and cooked in that ‘separate-slightly-chewy-grains’ way that so uniquely Persian…

BINGO!

I’m still just a little resentful, though. I mean, it’s no-one’s fault but my greed, but I hit this one with my brain set for some sort of Maghrebi mezze, so I ordered loads at the beginning, ‘small-plate’ style. What I learned is that every single one of them (save maybe the hangover ftira) was entirely worthy as a proper, grown-ass starter, and that duck was a real paradigm-shifter of a main. Saad is self-evidently a cook not a whisper short of genius. I’m going to take this meal as a recce run and next time I’m coming back wearing a bloody tie out of sheer respect.

But don’t believe the hype. I don’t reckon Impala is any more ‘North African’ than it is French/Cypriot/English or Thai. Saad is a truly inspired chef with an unashamedly rootless CV, turning out blisteringly good food entirely of his own creation. The fact that they’ve settled on ‘North African-ness’ is a bewildering product of marketing, and his menu would be as inspired if they’d randomly chosen ‘Welsh’.

His talent is based in proud eclecticism and the true ethnic root of his genius is where he was born…

Tottenham.

Postscript: There’s only one dessert on the menu at Impala. Bottom of the page.

Date and pistachio tart.

No frills … no adjectives… no clues.

You might think they’re only doing one dessert because they’re proud of it. They should be. It’s a pastry base, smeared with date paste, with a sort of custardy cheesecake layer and then a fluorescent green pistachio gravel on the top.

I honestly don’t have the words.

There’s only one dessert on the menu at Impala because there is now only one dessert.

All others are rendered permanently obsolete.

*What’s the name of Bambi’s vampire cousin? Vlad the Impala. Ask your dad.