A garden barbecue is as classic a signifier of a washed-out British summer as Wimbledon being called off for rain. A barbecue restaurant, on the other hand, is something to be savoured all year in a country where the midsummer temperature might only be marginally higher than it is at Christmas.
And if the classic Brit BBQ is likely to involve burgers and bangers as raw as the weather, barbecue options for the London restaurant-goer offer a rather sunnier outlook, from Texan smoked meats cooked low and slow to the glow of a Middle Eastern charcoal grill and the sizzle of a Korean tabletop ’cue.
So from smoked brisket and jerk chicken to cauliflower shawarma, goat curry and even a couple of British, ahem, bangers, here are 18 barbecue restaurants worth getting fired up over — none of which requires an umbrella.
Smokey Jerkey
Two words to lift the spirits on the greyest London day: “smoky” and “jerky”. The smoky element at this New Cross caff comes from the intensity of the char applied to the chicken from the fearsome-looking smoker in the kitchen, which turns out impressively blackened chooks that somehow stay tender. The jerky, of course, is the Jamaican seasoning which works just as well here on lamb and pork as chicken. All the meat comes topped with chicken gravy and accompanied by white rice or rice and peas, there are sides of plantain and patties and, if the functional surrounds don’t appeal, the pretty park on Telegraph Hill is a short stroll away.
158 New Cross Road, SE14 5BA, 07946 233176
Acme Fire Cult
Sharing plates, natural wine, luxuriantly-bearded chefs and craft beer (Acme is a partnership with the 40FT Brewery next door) tick off the cool east London checklist, but it’s the wood-fired grill that brings diners from all over the capital to this site near Dalston Kingsland station. There’s a Nordic-looking dining room but it’s the heated, covered terrace around the grill that has the best seats in the house. Unfashionable meats like mutton and bavette and veg dishes such as celeriac with mushroom kelp XO smoke over the coals, while seafood is a good shout too: Dorset crab with bone marrow and a salted cabbage and jalapeño verde, for instance. Look out for the new izakaya menu as well.
Abbot Street, E8 2LX, acmefirecult.com
The Barbary
A North African sibling of Chinatown’s Palomar, The Barbary has the same counter seating but here arranged in a horseshoe around a central grill where the flames guarantee sealed-in flavour, though your clothes may smell of charred protein the next morning. A blackened curl of octopus tentacle, smoky without, meltingly soft within and served atop coriander-scattered chickpeas is the star turn, though the menu is short enough that two people could eat their way through most of it, from nibbles of falafel and dolma to chicken shawarma, salmon dukkah and Jaffa-style cauliflower. Excellent cocktails, too.
16 Neal’s Yard, WC2H 9DP, thebarbary.co.uk
Hotbox
Brisket specialist Hotbox is currently resident at The Star by Liverpool Street pub but there are also concessions at the Victoria and Oxford Street Market Halls. Meats are cooked low and slow in a kiln-dried hickory and oak rotisserie smoker: St Louis pork ribs, beef short ribs or a smoked platter of pork rib, brisket, hotlink sausage, wings and pork belly. There are burgers, too, which seem a bit beside the point, but the brisket poutine and pickled slaw are very much essential. Saturday brunch at The Star brings an hour of bottomless drinks as Dutch courage for the karaoke after.
94 Middlesex Street, E1 7EZ, hotboxlondon.com
Mangal 2
Brothers Ferhat and Sertaç Dirik took over their dad’s Dalston dining room in 2020, kept the name and the ocakbasi charcoal grill and set about creating one of the most exciting Turkish restaurants outside Istanbul, reflecting their experience as young Londoners of Turkish heritage. Ferhat oversees front of house and a low-intervention wine list while former René Redzepi chef Sertaç cooks British ingredients with a modern Turkish accent and a zero-waste approach: cull yaw kofte with grilled apple, say, or whole grilled mackerel with a smoked bone butter and chemen. Hot stuff.
4 Stoke Newington Road, N16 7XN, mangal2.com
Cue Point
Currently in residency at the Orbit Brewery and Taproom in Walworth and Thirteen LDN in the West End, pop-up Cue Point is a British/Afghan catering company where the inspiration on the plate is just as important as the intentions behind the business. Founders Mursal Saiq and Joshua Moroney support refugees with professional catering courses and qualifications as well as language skills and trauma therapy: food for thought while tucking into a signature brisket “naco” (a fluffy naan/taco hybrid), smoked lamb in garlic and mint brine or pit-roasted sweet potato with spiced labneh and crushed seeds.
Arches 225-228, Fielding Street, SE17 3HD and 1-3 Denmark Street, WC2H 8LP, cue-point.co.uk
Chungdam
This new Korean, on the Soho site of much-missed Yming, serves all the usual tabletop BBQ classics but elevated through superior-quality ingredients and precise preparations. But while one might have melt-in-the-mouth A5 wagyu briefly seared before a quick dip in sesame sauce, it’s not all so high end: beef tongue, chicken thighs and pork belly are all equally excellent, whether wrapped up in lettuce leaves with a smear of gochujang or draped over red-vinegar rice like little logs of meaty nigiri. Don’t pig out on the barbecue: the seafood pancakes and beef tartar must not be missed, either.
35-36 Greek Street, W1D 5DL, chungdam.co.uk
Brat Climpsons Arch
Tomos Parry has pretty much pioneered the art of cooking over fire in London, a technique the chef mastered on camping trips in his native Anglesey, though the Basque Country is just as much of an influence on the menu as north Wales. This London Fields offshoot of the Shoreditch Brat seems more in tune with the great outdoors thanks to seating on plastic chairs on a marquee-covered courtyard, though the flame-licked food cooked in the open kitchen is just as accomplished as at the original: grilled mussels with velvet crab soup and chorizo, roasted chicken rice with grilled cucumber salad, and hay-smoked potatoes.
374 Helmsley Place, E8 3SB, bratrestaurant.co.uk
Brigadiers
An Indian spin on barbecue from the team behind Gymkhana, the Brigadiers kitchen features tandoors, charcoal grills, rotisseries, wood ovens and smokers. The results taste as good as that suggests, not only because the likes of bhuna ghee masala kid goat chops are cooked to finger-lickin’ perfection, but most things come drenched in some of the most delicious sauces in London: barbecue butter chicken wings, we’re looking at you. There are sports on the big screen, plus pool and card tables for those who prefer to be more active participants.
1-5 Bloomberg Arcade, EC4N 8AR, brigadierslondon.com
Texas Joe’s
Texan native and 10-gallon hat fan Joe Walters is the name behind this Bermondsey barbecue joint which comes with the seal of approval of the Dragon’s Den judges, who Waters persuaded to invest in his beef jerky business. Beef brisket, chicken thighs, pork ribs and mutton shoulder are slow cooked over oak to smoky, melt-in-the-mouth dreaminess; side orders of bacon-wrapped jalapeños, cakey corn bread and creamy mac’n’cheese are every bit as delicious and in the unlikely event you’re not as stuffed as a Thanksgiving turkey, there’s pecan pie for afters.
8-9 Snowfields, SE1 3SU, texas-joes.com
Berber & Q Grill House
The kind of cool restaurant-cum-dive club one might find in Tel Aviv, Josh Katz’s Haggerston railway arch combines the primal thrill of piles of smoky meats cooked over live fire with the phenomenal salad skills the chef picked up working for Ottolenghi. That apprenticeship means that veg dishes such as the cauliflower shawarma with tahini, rose and pine nuts are every bit as good as brick-pressed chicken with chermoula, and everything is fragrantly seasoned with spices and fresh herbs plus a knock-your-socks off garlic sauce for dipping. Sister restaurant Carmel in Queen’s Park is more chilled out.
Arch 338, Acton Mews, E8 4EA, berberandqgrillhouse.com
Parrillan Borough Yards
Determined to have an outdoor ’cue experience without actually doing any of the work? London’s second Parrillan, near Borough Market, improves on the King’s Cross original by having a team of professional chefs not customers in charge of cooking, so guests can instead maximise the BBQ vibe on a terrace knocking back a Spanish drinks list (not just wine but sangria, sherry and gintónicas) before tucking into hunks of flame-licked protein from the wood-fired grill: milk-fed lamb, ibérico ham and fish of the day. Why so Spanish? Owner Sam Hart is also behind Barrafina.
4 Dirty Lane, SE1 9PA, parrillan.co.uk/borough-yards
Smoking Goat
Ben Chapman’s two London ventures, Smoking Goat and Kiln, both involve Thai grill cooking but the Shoreditch restaurant probably better corresponds to what most people imagine Thai barbecue to be like, not least because there are some seriously strong cocktails to cool the palate from the riot of hot and sour flavours. The namesake ruminant might appear as a barbecue goat turmeric massaman curry or there’s kra pow smoked mutton, barbecue beef heart and khua kling chicken livers: none of it for the faint-hearted, even before factoring in the spice levels.
64 Shoreditch High Street, E1 6JJ, smokinggoatbar.com
Humo
“Humo” is the Spanish word for “smoke” and takes a barbecue enthusiast’s obsession with cooking with fire and smoke to another level of gastronomic geekery. The idea here is to flavour food according to the best match from six different woods, a Japanese approach to perfectionism less surprising when one learns that executive head chef Miller Prada is a protégé of Endo Kazutoshi of Michelin-starred Endo at the Rotunda. Cauliflower is cooked under ash, nine-day aged Hampshire trout with oak; even the signature cocktail comes with a flaming halo of smoked wire wool. Sit at the counter for the best view of the four-metre-long wood grill.
12 St George Street, W1S 2FB, humolondon.com
Smokestak
Chef David Carter jacked in a career working for the likes of Gordon Ramsay to move to Texas, buy himself a smoker and teach himself the art of barbecuing. Ramsay (and Texas’s) loss is London’s gain for Smokestak, a slow-cooked, wood-smoked specialist which began life as a food truck trundling around the capital’s food markets, is a labour of love to treasure. His brisket smoked over kiln-dried English oak is a thing of beauty but there’s also coal-roasted aubergine with red miso for the veggies and wood-roasted bone marrow with parsley to rival St John.
35 Sclater Street, E1 6LB, smokestak.co.uk
Cinder
The debut solo project of former Ritz chef Jake Finn, Cinder is a pair of smoke-and-small plates restaurants in Belsize Park and St John’s Wood: two bright spots for north Londoners who don’t fancy slumming it out east for a fix of flame-licked cooking. Here the heat comes courtesy of a Josper oven, which provides the essential flavour for chicken thighs and lamb chops, tiger prawns and whole sea bream, before Finn applies extra zing in the likes of rib-eye with Szechuan and chilli sauce.
66 Belsize Lane, NW3 5BJ and 5 St John’s Wood High Street, NW8 7NG, cinderrestaurant.co.uk
Temper
The City outpost of this quartet of barbecue restaurants taps into the atavistic thrill of watching a live fire with a five-metre-long open pit; the in-house theatre at the three other outposts isn’t quite as impressive, though all share the same dedication to sourcing tip-top British produce and butchering big cuts of rare-breed English cattle in-house, even if menu inspiration is more global: aged beef nachos, smoked goat tacos, brisket and Tajín sauce parathas, lamb and kimchi carnitas.
Two in EC2, W1 and WC2, temperrestaurant.com
Smokehouse
The granddaddy of London barbecue restaurants, Smokehouse opened in Islington around 10 years ago and set a template for much that followed: excellent native ingredients — day-boat fish, whole British carcasses, seasonal veg — grilled over charcoal and smoked with sustainably sourced English oak. If smoke doesn’t float your boat, you really are in the wrong house: expect smoked lamb croquettes, smoked Tamworth pork belly and smoked celeriac, with sides of coal-fired hispi cabbage and burnt butter and honey tart for pud.
63-69 Canonbury Road, N1 2DG, smokehouseislington.co.uk
