Brace yourself: the aptly named BAM is a big hitter in every way – flavour, portion and noise
Black Axe Mangal, 156 Canonbury Road, London N1 2UP (blackaxemangal.com). Small plates £6-10.50; large plates £15-24; desserts £6-7.50; wines from £30
One day in 1994, while waiting for his new restaurant to open, chef Fergus Henderson went to the Everyman Cinema in Hampstead along with all the other food pervs, for a screening of La Grande Bouffe. At one point the louche dinner party guests, working hard to eat themselves to death, sit around licking the marrow from roasted bones. As Henderson once told me, a lightbulb illuminated above his head. “I thought, there’s a dish for me.” He added a parsley salad, a heap of salt and some toasted sourdough, and created one of the single most copied plates of food of the last quarter century, and rightly so. The shiny gems of marrow melt into the sturdy platform of the toast. A flake or two of salt makes it sing. The bright, acidic parsley salad cuts through the richness.
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