The Counter is a weekly column from award-winning restaurant writer and broadcaster Jimi Famurewa. Sign up to get The Counter first, sent to your inbox every Wednesday.
Hello team.
From the outside, it looks like the afterlife is treating Black Axe Mangal exceptionally well. Eight months or so after Lee and Kate Tiernan’s pulverisingly loud nose-to-tail restaurant shuttered its beloved Highbury site and announced an indefinite pause, it has had the air of a travelling roadshow crossed with a culinary spirit quest. There have been takeovers of the stoves at Rambutan and The Dusty Knuckle. There have been poitin-soaked pop-ups in Ireland, and chilli crisp-slathered servings of smoked hogget dished up at Meatopia Glasgow. Now, there is another tantalising left-turn: a one-off, one-night dinner at the Bermondsey branch of Angela Hartnett’s Cafe Murano on August 4.
The event – which blooms from Hartnett’s long friendship with the Tiernans – will serve as the curtain-raiser for Broadsheet London’s inaugural Dine Out Festival (August 4 to 10). And the festival has, if you’ll forgive my heavy bias, a genuinely exciting programme of link-ups, special dishes and parties that encompass everything from Meedu Saad’s grill-whispering overhaul of Sessions Arts Club to The Plimsoll’s Ed McIlroy reimagining Quo Vadis’s peerless eel sandwich. It promises, fittingly, to be the gastronomic equivalent of a cameo-laden, Odyssey-sized summer blockbuster.
But if we look beyond the specifics of Dine Out, then we can also see that London’s restaurant scene appears to be in the grip of an intense bout of collab-mania. The Fat Badger welcoming in the likes of Camille and Bouchon Racine. Filipino Thai Friendship (aka Tintin from Swilipino and Dow of Ginn Khao) continuing a roving series of long-term four hands residencies. The recent nostalgic link-up between Fink's and La Grotta Ices and this week's union of progressive ocakbaşı Mangal II and acclaimed Cambodian concept Barang. Collaborations are as omnipresent in London hospitality as multipacks of blue roll. And yet, I think the current explosion in culinary hook-ups of every size and formulation demands some scrutiny. Why do they suddenly seem to hold such appeal for the city’s chefs and restaurateurs? What is their lasting impact? And can they ever be more than canny exercises in brand-building?
Let’s deal with that last bit of devil’s advocacy first. The span of what constitutes a food world collaboration is broad and varied – covering everything from two tiny independent bistros banding together for a one-off dinner in a 40-cover space to a giant conglomerate financing a wearying “activation” in a prime Soho site. Something like, say, Levan’s ongoing French Connection event series with Gallic chefs and Anya Hindmarch’s annual, brand-gobbling Ice Cream Project, ultimately, occupy the same broad terrain of attention. The result is that even the most pure-hearted and organic of collaborations can carry the associative trace of something dreamt up by a marketing department.
There are two important realities to counter this line of thinking. The first is that genuinely momentous, novel restaurant collaborations will always cut through the noise (notably, looking at Dine Out, Black Axe Mangal x Cafe Murano and Impala’s commandeering of the Sessions Art Club terrace have both sold out). The second is that, to think of collabs and one-off dinners as a voguish aspect of London’s restaurant scene is to look at them the wrong way. In fact, the city’s ever-twirling merry-go-round of regular guest chef programmes (like Rambutan & Cousins and Quality Wines & Friends), residencies, international link-ups and collaborative specials just feels like the way things are done now; the whole meal rather than a decorative side dish. Impermanence and precarity reigns. Investment for hospitality projects has scarcely been more difficult to access. So it is not all that surprising that London chefs are embracing the ephemeral, leaning into camaraderie and finding opportunities to do cool things with people they like.
And this is another important factor in all this. Why are we seeing so many collaborations and jointly authored, limited-run dishes across London? Well, for the simple reason that it is a fun, enlivening blast of creativity for creativity’s sake at a time when the grinding economic realities of the industry have never been more acute. For Dine Out, this means a live-fire collaboration between Rambutan's Cynthia Shanmugalingam and Tomos Parry at Brat Climpson's Arch; the union of beloved pubs The Pelican and The Marksman; a night of cabaret at Dalston's Roses of Elagabalus with a feast by Iranian Iraqi cafe Logma, and more.
Zooming out, some more of my recent highlight collaborations have included Ben Lippett’s Pears For Lunch event series wrangling the likes of Helen Graham and getting the Pogues to play south London institution Skehans; Celestial Peach’s Jenny Lau concocting a recent doughstick cheung fun special for Chinatown stalwart Tao Tao Ju, and Dough Hands reconfiguring Mondo Sando’s mala dust-sprinkled, A1 Beef Drip sandwich.
These are not cynical, money-spinning endeavours but examples of imaginative, talented chefs turning mutual respect and admiration into something greater than the sum of its parts. The London restaurant collaboration is not going anywhere, and nor should it. There is strength, and a fair bit of enlivening deliciousness, in numbers.
Broadsheet London's Dine Out Festival runs from August 4 to 10 and tickets are on sale now.
For Jimi Famurewa’s dish of the week, sign up to get The Counter first, sent to your inbox every Wednesday.
Got a question about London's dining scene that you'd like Jimi to answer, or a hot tip about a great place to eat or drink in London? Email jimi@broadsheet.com.
