Impala, the latest restaurant from the Super 8 group, has arrived in Soho with a blaze of hype. Executive chef and co-founder Meedu Saad, formerly head chef at Kiln, has created a dining experience that defies easy categorization. The menu is a hazy blend of North African, Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, and British influences, resulting in dishes that are both familiar and utterly unique.
A Dreamy, Dark Nook in Soho
The restaurant is defiantly dark, with diners using iPhone torches to read the menu. The loud jazz adds to the atmosphere, as guests query dishes like 'bird's tongue pasta braised with spiced oxtail' and 'molokhia, braised jute leaf and shoulder of cull yaw sheep.' The bird's tongue pasta is actually orzo, and molokhia is akin to spinach, but the menu is a puzzle that servers are eager to explain.
Extraordinary Dishes
We started with beef tartare, smoked with sweet Tunisian harissa and crunchy deep-fried bread. The honey bread with pounded white beans and bottarga was insanely good. Rustic aish baladi, an Egyptian wholegrain bread, came with fresh harissa paste, and langoustine kibbeh with sun-dried wheat was wrapped in perilla leaf cones.
Saad's cooking is a mesh of influences: childhood trips to Egypt, Turkish-Cypriot cooking from Green Lanes, and Kiln's raw, take-me-or-leave-me style. Dishes feature nettles, garum, and fattoush salad with pistachios and anthotyros cheese. Suppliers include Welsh farmers, Spanish citrus growers, Cretan olive oil producers, and Cornish fisherfolk, listed on the website like movie stars.
Wine and Cocktails
The wine list is nerdy, ranging from French pouilly-fuissé to Slovakian orange wines and Moroccan reds. Cocktails include banana rum punch, bathtime martinis, and Long Island iced teas.
Main Courses
We ordered monkfish wrapped in grape leaves, cooked over coals, and grilled short rib infused with rosemary and three types of black pepper. Artichokes came with nettles and pale sheep's cheese. This food is extraordinary and inimitable, feeling like a 3D printout of Saad's mind.
Dessert
Impala offers just one dessert: a riotous, salty-sweet date and pistachio custard tart for £12. No sorbet to fill the menu. I respect that fully.
Impala is like no restaurant I've ever been to, yet it echoes almost all of them. It's a long-ago holiday in Tunisia mixed with late-night dinners in Stoke Newington, with throwbacks to 90s cocktails at Alphabet Bar. This hazy blend of styles, cuisines, and shabby-chic luxury might be the future. Impala is shamelessly, brilliantly too much.
