SEVERE ALERT: FREELOADER #7 is here!

Dear readers: we come to you at a time when the mere suggestion of a ‘barbeque’ will have the Burnham banshee screeching from phone speakers, imploring you not to accidentally set fire to Daventry with a disposable. 

Ignoring the pleas of the fire brigade, we’ve cracked on all month with what we’re calling our ‘meat gauntlet’ - a bumper look at three of the hottest new smokehouses in the capital, not to mention a big pre-season lunch in Fulham, and what your favourite food content guy says about you. It’s the summer special, baby, and it’s fit to burst!

The arid summer of ‘26 has been a discombobulating and borderline unpleasant experience. The fun and exciting barbeques of early July have turned into the boredom-induced barbeques of late August, where you find yourself grilling sausages and kebabs out of a sense of seasonal duty more than anything. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t still some joy to be mined from the glowing coals. Three new smoky spots have opened in the capital over the last month or so, each with their own distinct take on America’s Only Culinary Tradition. Humanitarians that we are, we’ve ventured across continents and jurisdictions, through geopolitical red tape and hunger-suppressing medication, to give you the skinny on each. 

The ‘Texan-Afghan’ BBQ, Cue Point, has had a great summer: lavish praise and soft-focus profiles from the broadsheets and their supplements abound. It’s just as well: their desultory Google Maps rating is being dragged down by the pronouncedly crap Big Pub it’s hosted in, the ‘Garden Bar and Grill’ by Latimer Road station. You wonder why they don’t just give the whole venue over, zhuzh the place up a bit to fit with the theme, a couple of geometric rugs here and there, y’know?

We had our pick of the menu, and picked away: naan, daubed in pimento cheese; brisket and pickle skewers in place of the sold-out chicken option; a smash burger made with trimmings from their whole-butchered cows. The naan was great, psychotically savoury and heavy with the cayenne, no oil splitting from the cheese and more than a lick of smoke from the grill. Brisket, I think all parties can’t admit, isn’t ideal for skewering; trying to gnaw off a chunk with a pickle slice beneath was unwieldy at best.

The slices of brisket, however, came out way better standing alone – pulled apart but not too readily, seasoned through but not salty, and the rose blush of the feted smoke ring. Along with it, the Afghan centrepiece: smoked lamb shank with kabuli pilau. We pride ourselves on knowing our pilaus and plovs, and this version had all the fragrance and tallow you could hope to find at Watandar or Charsi Karahi. Like a botched prison murder, though, the shank was a bit of an afterthought: yielding, as slow-cooked lamb often is, but no real oakiness. As if to underscore the Afghan feel, a crew of old boys straight from Safdie Brothers central casting chonged a hundred Lucky Strikes immediately next to us, producing a shared tobacco cloud that went to war with the thick oak smoke around us. You can’t say Cue Point doesn’t have atmosphere.

If you thought Cue Point had hype, whew – you should see Hon’s BBQ. A former crate digger and poker player has a revelatory experience at Austin’s one-star, genre-bending InterStellar BBQ; interns at the restaurant, learns at the altar; then brings its techniques to a pop-up at All My Friends in Hackney Wick, quickly beloved by All The Right People. His crowdfunded permanent space over the road, in the bones of the old Silo and atop Crate Brewery, has been packed out every day since opening, on the promise of Southern technique and Chinese flavour profiles cannily harmonised.

The first problem is that it still feels like Silo inside; like, exactly the same, except for a few odd additions to the dining room. Untethered to a free-flowing nearby bar packed with hypey Junior Sales Execs drinking £7 pints, the atmosphere felt altogether too restauranty. Where was the smoke? Where was the fun? 

Given our spot at the counter, we were able to watch each of our starters get assembled: tofu blocks braised in master stock (decent; could have been braised longer), duck pancakes (great, should be a main) and a tomato & melon salad (clean, should have been a side). Our actual sides came as starters, too: a beef dripping scallion oil rice that needed more grease, and the typhoon shelter green beans submersed under a blizzard of fried garlic – no complaints. We’d had essentially 80% of this before the first bit of barbecue came out, extended picky-bits as we drummed our fingers for the main event to pull up and knock our socks off. 

Our socks stayed on. Ox cheek, rather than glazed unto decadent stickiness, was treated like brisket, though left to speak for itself, crying out for a shake of something. Taiwanese pork belly, on the other hand, was braised nicely in soy, though lacking the intensity of a proper lu rou fan, and was served in a Lilliputian portion of two cubes: it’s hard to see why this needed the barbecue at all. The standout was the beef short rib, which had been cooked excellently with a great degree of smoke and a sauce that reminded us of the classic Sichuan cold salad dressing: hot infused oil flashed over garlic, chillis and spring onions then tempered with soy and vinegar. Problem was, it was described on the menu as a Sichuan peppercorn sauce – something which took us by genuine surprise when we checked after.

Before we get into From The Ashes, the vaunted smokehouse from ex-Temper chefs Martin Anderson and Curtis Bell, we must stress that its new home, Mare Street’s Five Points Brewery and Taproom, is basically the antithesis of everything FREELOADER represents. The entire gaff was teeming with the worst, most Boschian combination of people imaginable. There was an office leaving-do, mugging for a mass photo; tens of small children running amok, accompanied by their feckless, dead-eyed parents; clusters of terribly dressed Home Counties blokes, one of whom was wearing a beret and giant baggy shorts, and had a Penguin Classic secreted in his back pocket, like he was going to one of those ‘Performative Male’ contests off Instagram. We say all this because, even though we’d rather go bobbing for hypodermics than endure this crowd again, From The Ashes was so good we’d be tempted to reconsider.  

We weren’t given a choice at From The Ashes, instead being served a selection of hits, and hits they were. Before the BBQ proper came out, we were given a couple of birria tacos, which were honestly as good as anything you’d get in May-hee-co, and a frankly outrageous ‘Del Piero’ doughnut; a sweet and savoury mass of dough, chilli jam, ‘nduja, pork crackling and a light sprinkle of sugar. Fun and unctuous - functuous. 

The main event was a platter of beef short rib, a chicken leg, a big silly sausage, a pork belly rib, pickles, flatbreads, corn and sauces. The short rib came off the bone, the chicken leg oozed juices, the sausage was fragrant and spiced, the flatbreads were fluffy and light, the chimichurri was anything but an afterthought to the BBQ sauce it sat next to. It was accomplished, confident, delicious, and allowed a welcome distraction from the seven-year-olds playing ‘it’ near our table, beckoning us to book vasectomies the following morning. 

Is it fair to pit these places against each other? Perhaps not; they all offer different things in different environments, and are all welcome additions to a food scene which can navel-gaze at the best of times. But there was something endearing in the simplicity and execution of what From The Ashes served that shot it to the top spot for us. Now someone get on the weather machine and give us some pissing rain so we can do a goulash and fondue ranking.

The Three Horseshoes, Batcombe: Cut my fingers trying to crack langoustines.

In this Brave New World of food content, everyone’s got their guy, their own personal food Jesus. Broadsheet critics no longer hold the monopoly on taste – now, any mug with a DJI Osmo can build a horde of aspirant gluttons keen to eat through their screen. From poshos to plonkeurs, there’s a type of guy for every type of guy - but what does your favourite one say about you? Well, you’re about to find out!

GARY EATS 

You’re just a bloke, a bloody normal bloke, probably in your twilight years, and you just like to see another bloody normal bloke be dazzled by a - what do they call it - ‘tasting’ ‘menu’? What will they think of next! You get extremely angry at people playing videos aloud on their phone on trains but your ringtone - the Z-Cars theme - would deafen a newborn if it were in its proximity. You’re actually a bit afraid of the outside, because it all looks different now than when you were a kid, so you live vicariously through Gary’s adventures to either a three Michelin star restaurant or a disgusting cafe in Pimlico. His vacant delivery and charmless everyman brogue soothes you. You’re nearly at the end. Let’s see Nige into Number 10 and we can slip away into that good night, eh?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN 

You’ve seen Parts Unknown, yeah? But have you seen A Cook’s Tour – the one before? It’s more, like, real. No Reservations was great wasn’t it; what was the deal with The Layover? He seemed a bit off, now I think of it… are you going to watch the film? I got the cookbook last year – desperate to have a go at Tony’s favourite sandwich. Yeah, Tony – they used to call him Uncle Tony, the Momofuku guys. Have you tried Fernet Branca? It’s fucking rank at first mate but honestly, I’m kinda into it. Oysters, too, he loved them. To be honest mate I still can’t do oysters but I’ve had a go. Yeah I can send you the Vittles map if you want, we should do that place in Sidcup soon. 

THOMAS STRAKER

You’re a thirty-five-year-old asset manager. Two years after your salary crossed into the 63% marginal tax rate, and success doesn’t feel like you thought it would. She’s back in work after baby number two, your firm’s getting bought by Americans, and it’s still not cool to openly vote Conservative, though Kemi has been impressing you lately. Suddenly, your Instagram reels pull up a square-jawed posho you could swear was in your house at school, curling a quenelle and saying “butter is sexy”. Butter is sexy, you think, mildly priapic in a way you haven’t been since Y8 ruggers. You consider sharing the reel with your wife, before closing it in fear she’ll fancy him a bit too much. This one’s just for Henry. 

EATING WITH TOD 

You’re a let-people-enjoy-things absolutist. You think things can only be bad if they’re actively harming someone physically or emotionally. You think Tod is just a happy-go-lucky guy. But like Tod, you possess a strange toxic positivity, and a blood-curdling normiedom reverberates off you. Either that, or you’re indulging in a serial hatewatching, consuming content of a man getting his hands sticky just so you can have a dissenting view at the work Christmas party about something, asking the girls in HR if they’ve ‘seen this guy?’ In reality you’re no better than the true Tod stans, and still pray at the altar of the cheese-pulling goon. 

ANDY HAYLER 

You have autism. We have autism.

Kismet: Got chilli butter on my pants.

We’re launching a new format to put all the stuff we notice in, around and about restaurants each month, as read by ephebophilic comedy tycoon Jerry Seinfeld. 

What’s the deal with…?

Confiting vegetables

Tableside olive oil service

Elevated crisps

Using hot charcoal to toast the tops of meringues

Somerset

Guinness cake

‘Tuna season’

Reduced service hours

The whole Max Coen leaving Dorian thing

Bar Douro: Severe croqueta burns to the face. 

In many ways, fuck Adam Byatt. He has a well-earned and well-kept Michy at Trinity in Clapham, a YouTube channel serving up the best recipes on the entire platform, an easy-going paternal manner, a sexy shock of silver hair, and has now opened up Rosina, an Italian restaurant in Wandsworth, which we’re reliably informed is booked up for months. God truly does have his favourites. 

Lesser spake’d about in the Byattsphere, though, is Constance, which opened last summer, and is bizarrely attached to Fulham FC’s home ground Craven Cottage, and sits atop a dystopian food hall and a newbuild ‘pier’ featuring confused tourists on deck chairs drinking Aperol, wondering where the sun went. Could this strange, anomalous restaurant be the chink in the burgeoning Byatt empire’s armour? Annoyingly, the answer is a pretty resounding ‘no’. 

While the interiors do lean a little bit on the Dubai chocolate end of the scale for our tastes, it’s an undeniably pleasant room, and we were sat with a view of the murky Thames, observing some strapping lads rowing to and fro. An adjacent table hosted a crew of young cleanshirt business types, Fulham mid-brass we’d imagine, talking about how Chelsea are ‘dark horses’ this season; a parodically west London scene.

We did wonder: how does this work on matchdays? You wouldn’t want to be having lunch here when the Inter City Firm pulls up, pissed off and pissed up from an hour’s ride on the District Line – but that’s Shahid Khan’s problem, not ours. 

Anyway, out came our snacks: first, a trio of puff pastry anchovy fingers griddled into waves. These were excellent – fat on salt on fat, like a Christmas treat you’d get at a rich mate’s house. The pea and mint tarts taste like peas and mint; tick, tick, though a little bavarois could’ve taken it up another notch. And don’t let the girlies know, but Constance has the best skate knobs this side of the French House staff rota, fried expertly and served on a curried gribiche that went straight on our Sauces of the Year.  

We’ve been fooled by snacks before, as regular readers will know. So we say without exaggeration that we were TERRIFIED of the starters coming out. We needn’t have worried. The crab and tomato omelette – ordered for banter; it sounded mental – was better than the version at Mountain. Their Russian salad was more Tsarist than tapas, thank god: not that we don’t love a gloopy mayo-bomb every now and again, but this one was elegant, chivey and dolled up with Oscietra. Then there was the coronation chicken pâté en croûte, which was somehow even better than it sounds.

The mains suffered from inevitable comparison with what came before, but were still lightyears away from being categorised as ‘not good’. Roast monkfish tail was sat in a creamy sweetcorn base punctuated with flashes of green chilli that read a little too brash and American, at odds with how deftly done everything else was.

The skate wing, on the other hand, was as classically executed as you could hope, the sort of thing you'd expect a top Cordon Bleu student to produce at graduation. Not too much brown butter, not too many capers, not too many croutons, just enough of everything. Byatt can design the menu but it takes skilled chefs to execute it like this. We're total perverts for technique, and it was displayed in spades all the way through this meal.

With a menu this broad – and it is broad – you could forgive Constance for phoning the desserts in. Not the case here, with a gorgeous white peach sorbet holding the line on sweetness, as good a sorbet we’ve had in a long time. Today’s Trifle, as it was listed, was a straight-down-the-middle stunner: vanilla creme pat, good strawbs and a faintly boozy jelly, topped with a fluted crown of whipped cream. Dainty and ornate, sweet but not saccharine, playful without feeling like a regression session, and only a tenner!  

There is literally no getting around Constance’s weird location. “No way,” you’ll think, feet aching from the twenty minute walk through Bishops Park, “it’s actually inside Craven fucking Cottage.” You don’t come to Fulham without good reason, but Byatt’s typically exceptional food is as good as any. Some blokes have all the luck. 

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Arrivederci!