Same Impala?
Super 8’s sixth restaurant amplifies all the group’s strengths, and some of its flaws. Words by Jonathan Nunn. Photographs by Cole Wilson.
Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. Today, Jonathan Nunn is back from his sabbatical with a review of Impala, the new restaurant by Super 8. Last week, we released a podcast with Super 8’s head of sourcing and development, Songsoo Kim, which you can listen to here.
As ever, to read this review in full, please consider a subscription to Vittles for £7/month or £59/year, which gives you access to the last six years of the newsletter, including all our restaurant coverage.
Every restaurant opened by Super 8, the group that has done more to define the style of modern London dining than perhaps any other, is built around a particular structure. The original Smoking Goat had its horseshoe cocktail bar. Kiln, a crucible of a Thai restaurant, is heated by a series of red-hot claypots and burners. Both versions of Brat and Mountain are based around the expanse of the grill. At Impala, Super 8’s sixth restaurant, it’s the oven, a gorgeous, almost futuristic design whose thin opening resembles a concrete visor, or a brutalist floppy-disk drive. Out of it comes aish baladi, Egypt’s staple bread, puffed up to the size of a whoopee cushion and baked until the bran on its crust starts to catch. The first time I saw it come out of the oven I had to suppress a smile. Super 8 has made its name by being at the cutting edge of what’s about to be popular in London, and has often done it by going back to basics. In Impala’s case, it has raided the newest trends of 3000 BC.
The bread is a calling card of Meedu Saad, Impala’s genial co-owner, who has the air of a trusted capo who has just been made. Saad was once head chef at Kiln, but you always heard rumours there might be a proper Meedu restaurant on the horizon – not Thai but something that might play into his own Egyptian and north London heritage. Impala is indeed a Meedu restaurant, but before that it is something much more fundamental. It is a Super 8 restaurant. The place it has most in common with is Tomos Parry’s (and Super 8’s) Mountain, despite there being no overlap in cuisine. It shares all the ticks that have become part of the group’s template: a buzzy dining room – imagine a Turkish ocakbaşı set in The Tanks at Tate Modern – an eclectic, almost overwhelming menu that scampers across any defined borders of national cuisines, luxe-progressive assemblages of carefully sauced vegetables and descriptions of protein that convince you to spend far more than you anticipated.
It now feels you can now talk about a ‘Super 8 restaurant’ like you might talk about an ‘A24 film’, as if the group itself has auteurist tendencies. Each restaurant shares a core philosophy set down by owners Brian Hannon (the group’s accountant, and producer) and Ben Chapman (who serves as the restaurant’s creative director), plus a group of regulars that includes head of casting sourcing and development Songsoo Kim (who is, full disclosure, a regular Vittles contributor). I don’t make the comparison with A24 lightly: both have spent the last decade appearing to be at the avant-garde while also being ruthlessly successful – Impala, for example, is already being described at the hottest table in the city despite having no menu on its website, choosing instead to list the regenerative producers which supply it. It’s this contradiction that so many restaurants around the country try (and often fail) to ape: if you have been somewhere pairing an on-trend cuisine with impeccably sourced British produce and a Fela Kuti playlist, then you are ingesting the legacy of Super 8, whether you know it or not.
Impala, then, could be read as more of the same but new; a restaurant made by committee for a dining scene that craves novelty in a controlled setting, opened by a group that has distilled success into a formula. But the question I have is this: can Impala resist being just another Super 8 restaurant, and instead create something truly great on its own terms?