Smokestak
David Carter grew up in Barbados, where cooking over fire isn't a trend, it's Tuesday. He studied hospitality in Toronto, did a stint in California, and landed in London in 2008 to work for Gordon Ramsay at Claridge's. Then the Savoy Grill. Then general manager at Roka. Front of house, white tablecloth, the full fine-dining apprenticeship. In 2013 he walked away from all of it to stand behind a smoker in a car park in Dalston.
Smokestak started as a Street Feast stall. Fridays and Saturdays at Dalston Yard, then Dinerama and Hawker House, worked around a day job that ran Sunday to Thursday. Overnight smokes. Four in the morning at the meat market. Festival chaos. Somewhere in there he bought a four and a half tonne smoker in the United States and hauled it across the Atlantic, a journey he still calls a barbecue pilgrimage from Texas to Dalston. The queues snaked round the block. Three years of that, and in November 2016 he opened the doors at 35 Sclater Street.
The restaurant is designed to feel like you've climbed inside the smoker. Carbon-stained black concrete, steel panelling, roller-shutter garage doors onto the terrace, a two-metre charcoal grill in the middle of the floor and a candle-lit bar in the basement. Staff wear leather and brass aprons. The brisket bun with pickled red chilli is the thing everyone orders first, and the pork ribs, the pigtails and the crispy beef shin are why they come back. Michelin gave it a Bib Gourmand within the first year. Nearly a decade on, the room is still full, and Carter has gone on to build Manteca on Curtain Road and Oma and Agora in Borough Market, where Oma took the first Michelin star ever awarded to a Greek restaurant in the UK.
The music was never going to be country and blues. Carter's instinct for the place was heavier than that, and ours was too. We were brought in at hard-hat stage, walked the site with the team, and specified the audio installation through our partner installer before a single table was bolted down. Then we built the sound. Dark, dense, London electronic music with a crate-digger's ear. UK bass, dubstep, garage, the low end that Jamie xx, SBTRKT and Bicep live in, much of it made within a mile or two of the front door. No obvious hits. The kind of records you have to dig for, played in a room that was built to be dug into.
It runs on individual hourly playlists, so the soundtrack moves with the room. A lighter, more melodic weight at six when the first tables sit down. Deeper and darker by nine when the grill is roaring, the roller shutters are open and the smoke is hanging in the street. Food this serious deserves music chosen with the same obsession. Smokestak gets both.
