Impala, London W1: ‘Shamelessly, brilliantly too much’ – restaurant review | Grace Dent on restaurants

Impala is like no restaurant I’ve ever been to, yet it somehow has echoes of almost all of them

Late last month, Impala drove into Soho already flaming hot in the hype stakes: this was a sizzling booking to brag about even before executive chef and co-founder Meedu Saad had turned on the stoves. Impala, after all, is a Super 8 restaurant, the group that has, among others, Tomos Parry’s Brat in Shoreditch, which has been constantly, unfalteringly brilliant since 2018. It also runs Parry’s second baby, Mountain, which is likewise wonderful; sometimes weird, yes, but always wonderful. Long before that, back in 2016, they opened Kiln, the famed live-fire Thai counter hangout that cheffy boys in beanies have tried and failed to emulate all over Britain, while Super 8’s beginnings were with the boundary-pushing and much-loved Smoking Goat. That is nothing less than a litany of solid-gold bangers, and now they’ve unleashed Impala by Saad, the former head chef at Kiln.

In any normal restaurant review, it would have been common to have by now established what type of food Impala actually cooks – north African? Middle Eastern? Mediterranean? British?, etc – but in this odd, dreamy and defiantly dark nook in Soho (every single one of us in the room, even those with perfect vision, had our iPhone torches on just to read the menu), narrowing down its origin story is not quite that simple. “Bird’s tongue pasta braised with spiced oxtail?” someone asked over the loud jazz. “Molokhia, braised jute leaf and shoulder of cull yaw sheep?” queried someone else. It went on: aish baladi? Ftira? “Bird’s tongue pasta is the Egyptian name for orzo,” I ventured, adding that I thought molokhia might be a bit like spinach, but never have I been more ready for a server to turn up and ask: “Guys, may I explain the menu?”

We choose a beef tartare with a smoky, sweet Tunisian harissa and crunchy chunks of deep-fried bread as brittle as pork crackling. We scoop honey bread through an insanely good mush of pounded white beans topped with chunks of pungent bottarga. There are rustic pillows of that aish baladi, an Egyptian wholegrain bread that here comes with a fresh, rich harissa paste, and langoustine kibbeh and sun-dried wheat all wrapped in a neat perilla leaf cone.