The best lamb in London: Blacklock reviewed

Blacklock is the fourth restaurant of that name – there are others in Soho, Shoreditch and the City of London. It sits in a former royal coach-makers in an alley near the Garrick Club under signage that says ‘Chop’.

We descend to a cavern. The walls are exposed brick, the floors are dark wood, and the ceiling hangs over exposed pipework. There is a map of a more ancient and more interesting London on the wall, from the days in which chop houses were as common as raw sewage, or horses. It’s fiercely brown; committed to brown; washed with brown: chairs, tables, light fittings, food. There are tables of men looking expansive like Italian rugby fans. They love Blacklock for its brownness, its simplicity and its blood.

This is an honest place, a chop house: a specialist restaurant which gets its meat from Philip Warren & Son in Cornwall. The owners searched the land, as if on some magical food-themed quest, and they landed on Cornwall, which is always pleasing: Arthur’s last battle, in cows. The animals, we are told by blurb, live ‘long, happy lives on beautiful moors’. Do cows care for aesthetics? I think they do, and only a fool thinks a fretful animal makes a good meal.

From the moor to the forest: Blacklock plants a tree for every guest it serves. To the meat: they serve beef chops (porterhouse, prime rib, bone-in sirloin), lamb chops (rump and cull yaw), and a smoked bacon chop, which is rare, my own precious: I have only found another in Hawksmoor Guildhall during a quest of my own.

This is like Beast, which serves the best steak that I have eaten in London, except it isn’t mad, intense, a rebuke to the diner. Like Beast, it has the price of the cuts scrawled on a blackboard – 400g, 450g, 500g – to be wiped off when they are sold, which creates the impression of eating in a particularly finely hewn marketplace.