Mountain is the brainchild of a team who knows restaurants. The unstoppable duo in question is, of course, the inordinately talented chef Tomos Parry, whose smash hit Brat still unofficially reigns as London’s coolest Michelin-starred restaurant, and the ultra-successful Super 8 Restaurants (Kiln, Impala, Smoking Goat - need we go on). Together they’ve opened another zeitgeist winner with Mountain, where Parry brings his unmistakable flame-licked, Basque-style cooking to Beak Street in Soho.
Mountain fills you with excitement from the minute you step inside its buzzy dining room. The space is bustling with activity, helmed by a green-tiled kitchen to the rear that is so casually 'open' one could very easily wander in and start manning the grill. Here, chefs calmly oversee their allocated stations, and the restaurant itself is organised into similar 'zones': counter seating runs down one side, high-topped tables and stools lie opposite, while a tightly-packed arrangement of tables in the middle cater to those who prefer the sturdiness of a proper chair. As we sit amongst the hubbub, surrounded by achingly cool thirty-somethings while we nurse one of its smoked olive brine Martinis, we're filled with a sense of giddiness. It's not the Martini. Rather, the team have curated a space that's bursting at the seams with warmth and energy.
True to Parry's style, the cooking is disarmingly simple and utterly delicious. Everything that flies out the kitchen arrives kissed with base-level smokiness. Walnut bread, charred on the grill, is topped with delicate slivers of raw sardines and sweet pear. Grilled squid and slow-roasted peppers are as good as the sum of their parts - and the parts are very good indeed. Parry sources his produce from the best suppliers in the country, which means that even the most pared-back plates require little more than careful cooking and some very good olive oil to be stupendous in their own right, including a fantastic whole John Dory. A moment also for the smoked potatoes, which are crisp-on-the-outside, waxy and dense in all the right ways, and arrive swimming in chive-spiked brown butter.
Finally, dessert. Mountain makes its brioche in-house, and has turned the fluffiest of breads into a custardy hunk of fried dough, delivered with creamy mascarpone ice cream and a fig reduction. Some will say Mountain is expensive, and it is, but you're paying for a restaurant that delivers the whole package and then some. The food is excellent, but it's all the other bits – the urban aesthetic, fashionable staff and undeniable buzz - that make Mountain great.