The trend: open-fire restaurants in London

With a crackle and a whoosh, the grill leapt to life. Tongues of flame swallowed a slab of sirloin, hissing as the fat erupted onto exposed coals, and infusing the dining room with a steak-scented haze.

We’re in Caia – a neighbourhood restaurant in Notting Hill that, like many others, is channelling the capital-wide vogue for open-fire cooking. As trends go, it’s nothing new. After all, humans have been cooking with fire since we were communicating in grunts. However, as Quintessentially’s Head of Restaurants, Keith Doyle, explains, there is joy in returning to the ancient.

‘We’re investigating old, old, old styles of cooking,’ he says. ‘It’s almost like we’re going back to the Neanderthal way of doing things – but better.’

Genuine open-fire cooking plunges food into flames with a spit, grill or pan, imparting smoky flavours and intense textures that are otherwise hard to achieve. However, a simple barbecue this is not. For example, at HUMO, a new wood-fired restaurant in Mayfair, the chefs treat fire cooking as a delicate art, with each dish flamed over a different type of wood to achieve subtly different smoky flavours (a technique you’ll also find at Tomos Parry’s BRAT in Shoreditch).

‘Cooking with fire adds an element of enhanced smoke-kissed and charring flavours from the woods and coal, allowing for searing and caramelisation,’ says Tim Lang, Caia’s co-founder and head of music. ‘It’s also a healthier way of cooking. The food cooks faster, allowing certain nutrients and antioxidants to remain.’

At Caia, ‘smoke-kissed’ is an apt adjective for everything we eat. Plump pork belly is rolled in char siu and then plunged into the fire, resulting in sticky, tender wedges that come to crisp, gnarly points. Pumpkin crescents are lashed by the flames until blistered, before being soothed by a silky cheese foam and a scattering of artichokes. Even the negroni has a slight smokiness, thanks to a touch of mezcal.

Although meat is the most common choice for this style of cooking, many restaurants are also choosing to spotlight vegetables – such as the wonderfully named Acme Fire Cult in Dalston. Over 50% of the restaurant’s fire-cooked menu is plant-based – a decision that was made, as chef Andrew Clarke explains, because he felt vegetables were under-represented in typical barbecue restaurants.

‘Vegetables have vastly more flavour profiles and wider textural range than proteins,’ he says. ‘They need a little more consideration when cooking over fire.’ At Acme Fire Cult, the outdoor kitchen fires leeks until sweet and soft, smokes new potatoes then piles them with tahini, and roasts tomatoes before drenching them in salsa verde.

In Soho, the team behind aptly named Firebird sees cooking with fire as an almost spiritual practice, resulting in dishes like fired scallops on a bed of truffled mash and crispy hunks of honey-bathed halloumi.

‘Cooking with fire for a chef is more about working with feelings rather than following a recipe,’ says Firebird co-founder, Madina Kazhimova. ‘We strongly believe there is a magic that comes from cooking with flame.’

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