Santo Remedio Taqueria will open in September. It costs £21.99 for the paperback and £24.99 for hardback.įive years after they were forced to shut their original restaurant in London’s Shoreditch, the team behind the Mexican Santo Remedio, near London Bridge, are returning to the area with a new venture. The shellfish section includes baked eggs with crab and cayenne, while for meat-free there’s a tomato, thyme and ricotta tart.
There are then a dozen recipe sections – Impressive Main Courses, Marvellous and Meat-Free, Showstopping Desserts and so on – from which you choose six, before swapping recipes according to taste. It starts with a choice of cover, the option to put the recipient’s name in the title, and a dedication inside. In a crowded market the Delicious Cookbook, which is designed to be personalised, looks like fun. It should probably be the house drink of the Restaurant Critics members club, should one ever open which trust me, it never will. Among the cocktails is a concoction of Grand Marnier, vermouth, bourbon and cherries called the Bitter Untwisted. Still, service runs at a cheery clip, and there’s a good stage show from the open kitchen. Restaurants tend to be set up by younger people who have yet to experience the sensory ravages of age.
On a warm weekday lunchtime Norman Cook’s choice of top tunes ricochets vigorously off all the hard surfaces in a way that will make the space difficult for some. ‘This one comes with sugared macadamias’: chocolate mousse. Or you can pay £35 a head and get them to chuck half the menu at you. Prices are keen, with most dishes in single figures and only a few in the teens. The real eye-catcher is their drop-dead-gorgeous pistachio ice-cream, with dribbles of chocolate and fresh mint. This one comes with sugared macadamias and cherries. Naturally, there’s a scoop of chocolate mousse. There’s a well-made lemon tart because, right now, offering one is apparently a condition of getting a restaurant licence. The short dessert menu is another one of those designed for ease of service.
For light against the shade, there’s a perky salad of shredded fennel. Still, the cuts of meat are pleasingly soft and heat-kissed to a sticky dark caramel. They should help you understand what you’re ordering. Words used on a menu like this do matter. I send over a picture and Roden identifies it as souvlaki. Except here, they are serving heavily sauced cubes of pork belly. In Greece and Cyprus, she says, there is a kind of doner using sliced pork, which is referred to as a shawarma. Subsequently, I check in with Claudia Roden, the great expert on the region’s food. I associate shawarma, an Arabic word, with the generally Muslim, non-pork-eating Middle East. There’s also something described as a pork shawarma, which does make my brow furrow. It’s just not a shawarma’: pork ‘shawarma’. It’s just a total bugger to get into your mouth, without disgracing yourself. It’s nice to eat: fresh and curiously purifying amid all the caramel star turns. It’s a canapé designed by someone who has never spilt food down their shirt. The thinnest slices of friable toast are piled with salted cherries, tomatoes and a tumble of buffalo stracciatella, that milky, foetal cheese of stretched curds. Spiced calamari fritti, under a generous leaf fall of sliced chillies, come with a preserved lemon aïoli the colour of daffodils. It is a lot of textures and butch lanolin flavours playing catch-up with each other. On the side is a dollop of cooling yoghurt. Lamb shoulder has been long-smoked until it is on the edge of a breakdown, then shredded, formed into fat filo-wrapped “cigars” and fried to crisp. There’s grilled halloumi from Sussex, as well as heat-blistered sardines with fried bread and an anchovy cream. Among the starters at Burnt Orange there’s a crudo of smoked stone bass. Now, it’s all about the impact of smouldering wood. Elsewhere in Brighton (and more recently, London), they have the Coal Shed where everything is, as the name suggests, cooked over burning coals. There, among many good things, I was served an expertly flame-grilled whole fish, which showed a clear understanding of the power of both direct and indirect heat. They also have the Salt Room, housed in an outcrop of the cheerless Hilton Metropole on the front. Given the team behind it, led by skilled restaurateur Razak Helalat, that’s unsurprising. The complex dish descriptions and that wood-fired oven deliver on their heat-bubbled promise.
What saves Burnt Orange from being an annoyingly self-conscious exercise in trend-surfing is the food. I appear to be assembling the evidence for the prosecution. ‘Fried to crisp’: lamb shoulder ‘cigars’.
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