Fire Alarm at Mountain Restaurant: Not Even the Implicit Threat of a Fiery Demise Could Drag Diners Away
Key Highlights :
At Mountain Restaurant in London, not even the implicit threat of a fiery demise was enough to drag diners away from this smoke-wreathed pleasuredome. On the fourth day of trading, the restaurant was already bustling with diners, chefs, and Super 8 management, when an alarm sounded out over the hubbub. Despite the alarm, diners stayed seated to enjoy their Menai Straits oysters, silken spider crab omelettes, and puffed zeppelins of grill-fired bread.
Mountain is the brainchild of Parry, a proud son of Anglesey with cherubic features and a rock frontman’s flopping fringe. His signature Basque-accented approach is evident in the rugged Balearic landscapes that the restaurant is oriented around, as well as in its oceanic flavour depth and cloud-skimming technical brilliance.
The menu is full of dishes that demonstrate Parry’s commitment to primeval, rustic pleasures. Raw sobrasada, delivered by , brought iPhone-thick slices of the spiced sausage (from an organic Mallorcan farmer called Luis Cirera) and little oblongs of toast (born from the wood-fired breads created by head baker Suzi Mahon and consultant dough-whisperer Pamela Yung) transformed, via a trickle of honey and some slivered guindilla peppers, into three crunching bites of unimprovable, piquant genius. Fat, bisected commas of sweet, raw scarlet prawn — set in a spill of fresh cheese like the gooey heart of some idealised, fantasy burrata — repeated the trick with surf rather than turf. Scorch-edged, creamy-middled beef sweetbreads were only slightly hampered by the textural challenge of woody violet artichokes.
The restaurant also serves large-format platters such as the signature lobster calderata, a roiling, three to four person dish, and a magnificent whole John Dory, burnished by the plancha and glimmering beneath a luminescent pil-pil sauce. There is a magnetic, tactile sensuousness to so much of the food (ditto a wine list characterfully split by theme as much as grape variety). However, it was the hidden complexity in so many dishes — the extraordinary housemade curd and girolle mix anchoring brightly citric grilled vine leaves; the rich, pork fat sheen and intricate, whorled crumb structure of a conclusive slice of Mallorcan ensaimada pastry — that consistently took diners’ breath away.
At Mountain Restaurant, not even the implicit threat of a fiery demise was enough to drag diners away from this smoke-wreathed pleasuredome. With its oceanic flavour depth and cloud-skimming technical brilliance, its commitment to primeval, rustic pleasures, and its hidden complexity in so many dishes, Mountain is a restaurant that is truly on fire in more ways than one.
