It's often very difficult to stand out from the crowd in Restaurant London, especially when - as in Firestarter's case at least - you appear to be serving the same kind of live-fire, internationally-ambiguous, ingredient-led menu that began to pop up all over the place after Acme Fire Cult showed there was a market for it. If this sounds cynical, it's not meant to be - everyone needs to make a living, and deciding to serve the kind of food you know people want is just basic common sense.
What separates the wild-farmed wheat from the chaff, though, is whether or not your live-fire, internationally-ambiguous, ingredient-led food is attempting not just to ape the success of somewhere else but to genuinely impress in their own right. Sure, superficially the menu at Firestarter seems very familiar, certainly to this particular jaded food blogger who has seen this kind of thing at pubs and markets and food courts all around the city. But as soon as the crab doughnuts arrived, soft, sweet buns containing a generous amount of white and brown crab meat spiked with chilli, I was reminded that putting crab doughnuts on your menu is one thing; quite another is making them as confidently as this. And they were great.
Lamb haunch could hardly have been cooked better - crusted from the grill, seasoned perfectly and with just enough of a chew that spoke of a top-quality product, the flavour was incredible - dense and gamey and framed so well by the live fire treatment. Mint chimichurri was generously applied and very nice but the star here was the meat itself, an otherwise cheapish cut of lamb presented at its absolute best.
Sea bream, boned (mainly - we found a couple but it wasn't a problem) and butterflied, had a dreamy buttery, crispy skin and a meaty, bright white flesh. I think I would have preferred the accompanying dressings to have been in a little pile on the side rather than scattered on top, as without them the beautiful chargrilled flesh of the bream would have really looked at its best. Also, somewhere - presumably as part of the sambal cabe ijo (an Indonesian chutney, apparently) were some incredibly bitter chunks of sour lemon, which seemed a bit out of place. Still, as I say, this was all about the fish, and the fish was everything.
Smash burgers are everywhere these days, and although not quite up there with the best of them (step forward, Whole Beast) this was still hugely enjoyable. May the burger gods strike me down for saying so, but I found the use of gloopy melted cheddar an actual improvement on the usual processed slice, perhaps because it was so hot off the grill it hadn't had time to cool down and go chalky.
Finally from the savouries, a side of "barbecued baby gem tahini Caesar". If you think that sounds like a lot going on at once, well, you're not wrong - but it actually worked rather well, the tahini going well (as it often does) with the crisp, smoky grilled veg. This side was just as much about the range of crunchy, crackly textures as it was about the umami-rich salad, and we polished it off quite happily.
So far so good, but Firestarter had one final trick up its sleeve in the form of "Wagyu Bone Marrow Lemon Thyme Mousse". Now I don't know if you're the kind of person that can see Wagyu Bone Marrow Lemon Thyme Mousse on a menu and not order it, but I am certainly not one of those people, and jumped at the chance to order perhaps the one thing on the Firestarter menu you wouldn't see anywhere else.
It did not disappoint. If you'd have told me before last week that a lemon-thyme mousse flavoured with bone marrow would be one of my favourite desserts of 2025 then... well, actually I probably would have believed you because I love crazy fusion-offal experiments like this, but it still came as a delightful surprise just how well it worked. At first, you get a very nicely done lemon-thyme mousse, slightly salty and with a pleasant dense texture. Then as it warms up in your mouth the beef appears, not overwhelming or disgusting but a kind of gentle, farmy, earthy memory of a flavour that turns the whole experience up a couple of notches. Very clever stuff, including an almost tobacco-ey smokey pickled pear side, although I wouldn't describe two small half-bones of mousse as being "for 2 sharing" - I think I could have had 4 of these little buggers to myself.
As I said, I was worried when first looking at the Firestarter menu that it wouldn't end up doing enough to stand out with the kind of food that's almost become a shorthand for 2022-2025 London. But the devil is in the detail, and Firestarter really know how to do this stuff. The 'standards' (such as they are) like the grilled steaks and the smashburgers are way better than they need to be and well worth the (actually pretty decent) price of admission. But anywhere marrying together bone marrow and lemon mousse needs all the encouragement they can get - this imaginative, surprisingly, wildly successful dessert is one that I will remember for a long time to come. And if I go back - and I probably will, as it's a part of town I find myself in quite a bit - I hope to find something even more noteworthy.
8/10
I was invited to Firestarter and didn't see a bill, but the above menu would have cost about £50pp including a bottle of wine. Which I reckon is a bit of a steal.
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