Eat Out London!Blacklock Soho
Chops cooked over charcoal with a little help from an old iron.
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Blacklock City of London review: excellent chops, but is the one-trick ...
food desserts
It’s one of those single-item restaurants you’ve been hearing about, which are standard across large swathes of the world but nonetheless took London by surprise in mid-2014 (see also: Chicken Shop, Cereal Killer, Hipchips).
You can’t geek out over lamb or pork chops like you can with, say, steak, eating it several times a week, studying the ageing process, inspecting the locker in which it’s hung, comparing tasting notes like carnivorous oenophiles (beef chops are, of course, sirloin or short loin steak, but they aren’t the star of the show here, they’re simply part of the chorus line).
Lamb belly ribs have the kind of caramelised fat that keeps me awake at night, in a good way.
Good meat, well cooked; the lamb pink as a rosy cheek, the pork fat almost liquid beneath the crispy exterior.
The waitress returned with a bowl of bread and butter pudding, some sliced rhubarb, and a gigantic oven dish filled with cheesecake.
Blacklock Restaurant Review
busyness food
Typically (for Soho) you can’t make reservations so get down there in good time or park yourself at the bar and make your way through the cocktail list whilst you wait!
On the subject of cocktails, they’ve crafted a short but sweet list for £5 each – an absolute bargain in our PR eyes!
You’ll be comforted to know that this foodie haven is backed by three ex-Hawksmoor employees, so you’re in safe hands when it comes to the meat and let us tell you the menu is most definitely oh-so-meaty!
We trialed the ‘All In’ for £20 a head and in return we were treated to a selection of pre-chop bites for the table – Egg and Anchovy, Cheese and Pickle and Filthy Ham – all lovely but the star of the show was still to come … the meat platter.
The meat was cooked to perfection, seared on the outside and pink and tender on the inside, with a delicious smokey flavour.
Blacklock, restaurant review: Good news if you're a fan of chops ...
food drinks
There are supposed to be "skinny chops": lamb, pork, beef (£4 each) – but there are no beef chops available.
Our waiter, who is actually co-owner Gordon Ker, says he'll throw in some extras to make up for the lack of beef, and the plate that arrives is, truly, groaning with all manner of glistening meaty bits.
Two plates arrive with dinky discs of Scandi crispbread, topped either with dainty blobs of egg mayonnaise, three wisps of onion and a single curled anchovy fillet, or stinky-in-a-good-way blue cheese and lip-puckering pickled red cabbage and carrot.
They are bites, not starters, and for a boisterous Soho crowd, they're just right, for they're the perfect accompaniment to Blacklock's other USP – "cocktails for a fiver".
Tweet me when the beef's back, Gordon… Blacklock, 24 Great Windmill Street, London W1, no reservations, £60 for two, with drinks Four more foodie notes from the past week A new Slow Food market at this lovely Holborn setting: Hansen & Lydersen smoked salmon, Arganic oil on everything… Ridiculously good chocolate Coco Chanel and Vivienne Westwood patisserie at the W Hotel's special tea for the Design Museum show.
Blacklock | Chops In An Old Soho Underground Lap Dancing Bar ...
staff drinks food
Blacklock | Soho Restaurant It’s not every day that a trio of ex-Hawksmoor employees open a restaurant dedicated entirely to chops, in the basement of an old Soho brothel.
And on that day, what was once an underground lap dancing bar became an entirely different kind of meat market: an intimate, industrially-styled pleasure palace for carnivores where communal wooden tables, a low and intimate cocktail bar, candlelit booths enveloped by exposed brickwork and a bustling open kitchen have been lovingly combined to create Blacklock.
You can: that’s Blacklock’s head chef.
He earned his chops – figuratively speaking – grilling steaks at Hawksmoor, but now he lives here, grilling lamb, pork and veal chops on a homemade, red-brick charcoal grill, before searing them with a Blacklock Foundry clothes iron from 1800 – leaving them pink and juicy on the inside, whilst lightly seared around the edges – and then serving them up alongside a choice of side dishes, like grilled courgettes and 10 hour coal-roasted sweet potato.
Blacklock | The Basement, 24 Great Windmill Street, Soho, W1D 7LQ Like to know about new London openings?
Blacklock, restaurant review: Good news if you're a fan of chops ...
food drinks
There are supposed to be "skinny chops": lamb, pork, beef (£4 each) – but there are no beef chops available.
Our waiter, who is actually co-owner Gordon Ker, says he'll throw in some extras to make up for the lack of beef, and the plate that arrives is, truly, groaning with all manner of glistening meaty bits.
Two plates arrive with dinky discs of Scandi crispbread, topped either with dainty blobs of egg mayonnaise, three wisps of onion and a single curled anchovy fillet, or stinky-in-a-good-way blue cheese and lip-puckering pickled red cabbage and carrot.
They are bites, not starters, and for a boisterous Soho crowd, they're just right, for they're the perfect accompaniment to Blacklock's other USP – "cocktails for a fiver".
Tweet me when the beef's back, Gordon… Blacklock, 24 Great Windmill Street, London W1, no reservations, £60 for two, with drinks Four more foodie notes from the past week A new Slow Food market at this lovely Holborn setting: Hansen & Lydersen smoked salmon, Arganic oil on everything… Ridiculously good chocolate Coco Chanel and Vivienne Westwood patisserie at the W Hotel's special tea for the Design Museum show.
Blacklock: Where carnivore's and cocktails delight | London Evening ...
food drinks menu reservations
Off I went this week to Blacklock, a former basement brothel in Soho, for chops and loud Human League and Devo.
Piles of skinny, tasty lamb, pork and beef chops are the stars of the show: chops cooked on a homemade charcoal grill and seared with vintage irons from a foundry in the Deep South called, well, Blacklock.
There’s a distinct pleasure in lazily commanding a ton of smoky grilled meat to be delivered to the table with sides of chicory and Stilton or barbecued Baby Gems, plus enough red wine to drown a horse.
Obviously, I’m sure at this point I’m supposed to complain that by replacing a brothel these chop-selling sods are ripping the heart out of Soho and that I should prefer subterranean knocking shops over a plate of skinny lamb chops with 12-hour ash-smoked sweet potato.
The all-in platters appeared on pieces of oily, meat juice-soaked flatbread, which were utterly delicious and, frankly, the enemy of clean living.
Blacklock: restaurant review | Jay Rayner | Life and style | The ...
staff food drinks menu cleanliness value
In London and elsewhere there are now places that do only fried chicken or steamed Chinese buns or, as with this week’s restaurant, only chops.
The idea of a “Japanese” restaurant covering all the bases from raw fish to ramen to battered things thrown in the deep-fat fryer is alien there.
The one complication: you’ll have to find mates who want the same small number of things.
Blacklock is founded by three veterans of the Hawksmoor steakhouse group, so the quality of the meat need not detain us.
The only clear mark of the Hawksmoor group is in the pre-chop bites: a trio of crackers for £3 stacked with either egg and a curl of salted anchovy, a hunk of cheese and their own crunchy pickled vegetables or something called “filthy ham”, which had run out the night we were there.