Grace Dent reviews Berber & Q

Even Grace Dent would join the queue for the grilled short-rib at Berber & Q
Grace Dent5 December 2017

It says something about East London’s rapidly morphing face that recently I arranged to meet a friend at Tonkotsu’s eastern outpost for a ramen pitstop, only to find, after much farce, that we were sitting in different ‘east’ Tonkotsus, postcodes apart. Until recently, one could say ‘a night out east’ and mean anywhere from cocktails at Satan’s Whiskers in Bethnal Green to losing a shoe at The Dolphin on Mare Street.

Nowadays, we need to be more specific. Last month, when I described beautifully debauched super-pub The Glory as being in Dalston, a flurry of complaints from gorgeous, slender things said that strictly it’s in Haggerston, which may be very nearly Dalston, but offers its own state of mind and cultural microclimate.

I imagine that Berber & Q, which appeared very recently in a railway arch close to Kingsland Road, is also the sort of place to get Haggerstonians feeling territorial. (It’s ‘Berber’ as in the racially diverse nomadic North African group found mainly in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, whose cuisine makes me purr with pleasure but I can never quite master at home.)

Life is too short to blacken an aubergine, and let’s be frank, it will never taste as good as something Josh Katz and Mattia Bianchi (both ex-Ottolenghi) are responsible for. The tray I consumed of smoked short-rib with date glaze, cauliflower shawarma (pictured), and beets with whipped feta was so delicious, I woke up the next day considering a house move. Berber & Q has a no-reservations policy: I need to live closer.

Because, worryingly, with regards to my beach body, Berber & Q gives me almost everything I want from a restaurant. It has bench-style group dining, but seated close enough to stay intimate. The décor is womb-like, cosy, dimly lit and brimming with modern Middle Eastern prettiness, while still feeling ever so slightly like the minicab office it once was.

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The long bar serves wholly decent cocktails, in proper glasses — not paper cups or chipped mugs or whatever we’re enduring in coolsville right now — boasting indecent names such as the Sumac Habit and the Haggerstoned. Oh, and there’s house music all night long. Or techno or progressive or whatever you want to call it but suffice to say, after two cocktails and a carafe of Turkish Clor Pinara, it will make you want to go out — and stay out — for two days solid.

Thankfully, there’s the food to stay focused on. An open charcoal grill is churning out dishes like lamb mechoui, joojeh chicken and pork belly with pomegranate molasses. The meats arrive, lazing on fresh pitta, their flavours sopping into the bread, on a tray laden with dill cucumbers, green salad and turmeric cauliflower, perfect to be shared and demolished in a dozen different combinations.

Ours: excellent merguez sausage arrived heaving with bits and pieces of loveliness, puddles of crème fraîche with harissa oil and saffron-roasted pistachios. Tiny pots of cumin salt are offered for dipping meat into. A dainty jug of fierce tahini was brought for our mezze side of squishy, blackened aubergine with boiled egg, which was deeply flavoured and devourable.

I bitterly regret that I didn’t order the smoked beans with lamb neck and crisp onion, but we’d already decided to return and pick our way down the menu. Essentially, Berber & Q is the sort of place I’d go to in Brooklyn and then become misty-eyed about how rarely in London we pull off this type of laid-back excellence.

We finished with a soothing rose malabi, which is a 1970s Fry’s Turkish Delight panna cotta by another name. Of course, the problem with this place for The People’s Republic of Haggerston is it’s going to get very busy with postcode interlopers. The no-bookings policy means locals will need sharp elbows or the patience to wait. Believe me, I’m strictly pro-reservations, but this Berber food is simply worth the Q.

Berber & Q

1 merguez £9

1 smoked short-rib £18

1 aubergine £5.50

1 beets with whipped feta £4.50

1 cauliflower shawarma £6

1 mixed pickle £3.50

1 pistachios £3.50

1 rose malabi £5.50

2 cocktails £16

1 Clor Pinara £15

TOTAL £86.50

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