If you know what to look for, you can work out the restaurant lineage of Impala just from a quick scan of the menu. Firstly, and most importantly, you want to try every last item - a feat frustratingly unavailable unless you're eating with at least ten of your friends. Between four of us last week, I think we managed to try about half of what was on offer, and looking back on the menu now some of the things we had to leave unordered still make me quite sad.
But it's the attention to ingredient detail that's another giveaway - strictly seasonal foraged things like greengage and wild herbs, intelligently placed offal such as sweetbreads and caul fat, and - the big flashing neon light as far as I'm concerned - the presence of Matt Chatfield's cull yaw, an extraordinary product which means only one thing: this is a Super 8 restaurant.
Together with Brat, Smoking Goat, Kiln and Mountain, places that are regularly spoken about as some of the best in London, a Super 8 restaurant is a stamp of quality like almost no other, and as close to a guarantee that you're going to have a good time that exists in town. And so yes, inevitably, Impala is brilliant - blindingly, uncompromisingly brilliant - a showcase of style and technique that thrills from the very first moment to the very last.
We began with martinis, because if any way you can, you should. These arrived alongside two types of bread - fluffy aish baladi which was warm and crackly and lovely and absolutely would have been the best bread I'd eaten all week if it wasn't for the other type, honey and olive oil, which was closer to fine French pastry than anything so humble as a house bread. Dipped in the grassy olive oil and some kind of salty chilli chutney it was absolutely superb - the kind of thing it would be way too easy to fill up on before the rest of the food arrived. It took a great deal of self-control not to.
I couldn't visit a Super 8 restaurant without ordering some cull yaw, in the form of these delicate little pastries a bit like samosas. The mutton flavour was rich and powerful, and a light dusting of icing sugar, which I was worried might be a bit weird, seemed to enhance the overall effect somehow - very clever stuff. That little dollop of sauce by the way is pickled walnut, which was very lovely too.
Borek had a supremely light and delicate pastry with all lovely little crisps and folds, and a fantastic spinach/feta filling. You get the impression that everything that makes it onto the menu at Impala is considered equally worthy as everything else - there's no "token" veggie dish, there are just dishes that happen to be veggie.
Ftira looked as good as it tasted, and it tasted amazing. Yet another masterclass in baking (the bread was warm and soft inside with a beautiful crust) was filled with a delightful avocado mixture and surrounded with a wreath of super fresh, and nicely dressed, herbs and edible flowers. I'm sure Impala wouldn't do anything as trite as design a dish for Instagram deliberately, but they may well have done it accidentally just by virtue of having an artist's eye for presentation.
Each new dish to appear maintained the same stunning standard. Sweetbreads are always a direct route to my heart but these were - or rather "this was", a giant single specimen - absolutely breathtaking. The sauce was deeply flavoured, glossy and perfectly balanced, the shredded onion salad crunchy and full of flavour but of course the real star was the offal itself, tasting of wood smoke and marmite and absolutely unimprovable. In any other restaurant I'd describe them as a "must-order" but must-orders are a bit useless when everything else is just as good.
Mackerel was a dainty little fillet, with moist, meaty flesh and a delicate crisp skin. It came with two separate - and excellent - sauces, one earthy walnut puree and one shockingly good taramasalata which, again, anywhere else would be one of the highlights of the meal. That Impala can make a tarama this good and have it appear as one of two sauces in a dish and nowhere else on the menu just shows how much talent this place has in the kitchen.
Birds tongue pasta came soaked in an oxtail ragu that had clearly been a long time in the making given the rich, complex flavour of it. Again, anywhere else this would be a dish to recommend to anyone you met for the next few days; at Impala it's just yet another thing to knock you sideways. Pasta had a lovely bite too.
Perhaps the only dish that didn't completely overwhelm with brilliance was a roast duck, which only managed to be excellent rather than exceptional. Perhaps it was just in comparison to everything else, but although it was cooked perfectly pink and had a nicely rendered skin, the molasses sauce was a little bit one-note and one or two pieces was enough before you started looking for interest elsewhere. Also at £68 for a quarter it was not exactly value either - you can get a whole one for £133 at Park Chinois in Mayfair. Perhaps not an entirely fair comparison, but still.
Monkfish wrapped in grape leaves, smokey and perfectly seasoned, were meaty and rewarding and about as good as an example as you will find anywhere. But even more impressive than the fish itself were the accompanying vegetables, particularly a leaf of kale soaked in a completely wonderful umami-rich jus of some kind and still crunchy and crisp from the grill. All the myriad of techniques on display, from the baking to grilling to sauce-making, were absolutely nailed over and over again.
Even a tomato salad was impressive - clearly using very good tomatoes, expertly dressed and topped with more crunchy fresh herbs. Beautiful colours on it too.
And still Impala had one final trick up its sleeve - this date and pistachio custard tart which put every other similar tart in London to shame. Of course the texture of the custard and the base were both impeccable, but you'd expect that of somewhere like this. The real stroke of genius was just a touch extra of salt in the mixture, which rather than proving a distraction just boosted the flavours to stratospheric levels. We'd eaten a lot by this point, but three portions of this tart all disappeared in record time.
So I return to my original point. It was perhaps inevitable that this, the latest Super 8 restaurant, would impress. But never underestimate just how difficult it is to put together an operation as good as this, no matter what experience and talent you have at your disposal. Plenty of places can pull together a menu of seasonal and foraged brilliance. Plenty have a warm welcome, great service, a lovely atmosphere. But there's very few indeed that can produce dish after dish of stunning invention and technical mastery that add up to one of the very best restaurant experiences anywhere in the country right now. It's not easy, being this good. They just make it look like it is.
10/10
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