There is a corner on Redchurch Street where I regularly lose sixty seconds of my life standing on the pavement, looking mildly deranged. Anyone who knows me would recognise the expression immediately – it is the face of someone who has a genuine decision to make and resents being forced to make it. My mother thinks it is my thinking face. It is not my thinking face. It is my I-cannot-believe-I-have-to-choose face.
The corner in question is where Redchurch Street meets Shoreditch High Street. The building that occupies it is not much to look at from outside – a worn, solid Victorian structure that has clearly been many different things to many different people over the years. What it is now, however, is remarkable: two of the most consistently brilliant restaurants in East London, stacked directly on top of one another. Smoking Goat on the ground floor, Brat on the first. Both cooking over fire. Both absolutely worth your time and your money. Both completely different experiences.
The sixty-second dilemma is this: you have arrived, you are hungry, and you now have to decide whether you are going upstairs or downstairs. The door you choose will give you a superb evening. The door you don’t will haunt you slightly for the rest of it. This is not a normal problem to have with a building. This corner has given it to me repeatedly and I have come to cherish it in the slightly unhinged way that you cherish anything that makes your life simultaneously better and more complicated.
I have been through this routine more times than I care to admit. Here is everything I know.
A Building With Unusual Ambitions
The corner site has lived several lives. Before it became the home of two celebrated restaurants, the ground floor space was occupied by The White Horse – a strip club that, by several accounts, was a fairly unremarkable example of its kind. When Smoking Goat moved in during 2017, they stripped it back to bare brick and raw timber and installed charcoal burners where the poles used to be. The transformation was, let us say, comprehensive.
How Smoking Goat ended up here
Smoking Goat began its life in Soho, on Denmark Street, in 2014. It was small, intensely popular, and perpetually rammed – the kind of place where you’d wait an hour for a table without particularly minding because the smell coming from the kitchen was that compelling. When the Shoreditch site came available, the team took it and scaled up considerably. The Soho original has since closed, which means this corner on Redchurch Street is now the only Smoking Goat there is.
How Brat arrived on the floor above
Brat opened upstairs in 2018, the debut solo venture of Welsh chef Tomos Parry, who had been cooking at Kitty Fisher’s in Mayfair before striking out on his own. The connection to Smoking Goat is more than geographical – Brat had the backing of the Smoking Goat team and shares their commitment to serious cooking without ceremony. Parry has since opened a second Brat at Climpson’s Arch in Hackney, but the Redchurch Street original remains the flagship: a wood-panelled first-floor dining room where you climb the stairs and immediately understand, from the smell alone, that something very good is about to happen.
Downstairs: What Smoking Goat Is Actually Doing
Smoking Goat describes its food as inspired by the late-night drinking dens of Bangkok – the kind of places that open after midnight and serve extraordinarily good things to people who know exactly what they want. The menu is built around charcoal, smoke, and the sort of Thai flavours that bear almost no resemblance to what you’ll find at the average high street Thai restaurant. This is the point. This is entirely the point.
The dish you must order
The chilli fish sauce chicken wings have been on the menu since Denmark Street and show absolutely no sign of going anywhere. They are, without exaggeration, among the finest things I have eaten in this neighbourhood – lacquered and sticky and deeply savoury with a heat that builds slowly and pleasantly rather than hitting you all at once. Order them without deliberation. Order more than you think you need.
The barbecued Tamworth goat shoulder is the other anchor of any Smoking Goat meal. Tamworth is a rare breed pig, and – the name of the restaurant notwithstanding – this is pork done the way pork deserves to be treated: slow-cooked, smoky, collapsing, served with a sauce that you will want to apply to other things in your life going forward.
How to approach the rest of the menu
Smoking Goat is best treated as a series of small plates rather than a conventional main course situation. The menu rewards sharing, curiosity, and a willingness to order things whose descriptions you don’t entirely follow. The brisket sausages, the duck laab, the morning glory stir-fry – none of these will let you down. Order more than seems sensible and work through it slowly. The room is loud and warm and the kind of place where an hour disappears without warning.
The drinks list is excellent and takes Thai flavours into the glass in ways that are considerably more successful than they have any right to be. The mango negroni sounds like a bad idea. It is not a bad idea. Neither is arriving at Smoking Goat having already decided you are only staying for one drink – that plan has never once survived contact with the menu.
Upstairs: What Brat Is Actually Doing
Brat is named after the Old English word for turbot, and if you want to understand the restaurant in a single image, it is this: a whole turbot, grilled over lumpwood charcoal in a handmade steel basket, carried to a table of four people who are about to have a very good time. Everything at Brat radiates outward from that image. The cooking is open-fire, the influences are Welsh and Basque, and the result is a restaurant that feels simultaneously ancient and precisely contemporary.
The turbot question
The whole turbot costs upwards of £150 and feeds four people. This sounds alarming until you eat it, at which point it sounds entirely reasonable and then, shortly after, seems like a genuine bargain. The fish arrives charred and fragrant on the outside and just barely cooked through – turbot being a fish that rewards restraint – with a quality that makes you understand why someone would name a restaurant after it. It is the kind of dish that generates the specific silence that falls over a table when everyone takes their first bite simultaneously and nobody wants to be the first to speak and break the spell.
If the turbot is beyond the evening’s budget, do not be disheartened. The bread with burnt onion butter is one of those dishes that sounds simple and tastes like a revelation. The burnt cheesecake is the best version of that particular dessert available anywhere in Shoreditch, and I say that as someone who has done the necessary research. Brat also holds a Michelin star, which it wears as lightly as any starred restaurant I know – the room is warm and slightly smoky and loud in a way that feels festive rather than oppressive.
Where to sit and what to drink
Ask for a table near the open kitchen. Watching the fire is part of the experience and the chefs, in my observation, cook better when they can be seen – there is a particular energy in an open kitchen that translates directly onto the plate. The wine list is built around natural and low-intervention wines with a strong lean toward Galician and Basque producers, which complements the cooking in an almost unfairly logical way. The team clearly thought hard about every bottle on that list, and it shows.
The Sixty-Second Decision
So. You are on the pavement. You are hungry. Upstairs or downstairs?
The honest answer
There is no wrong choice here, which is both the comfort and the frustration of this particular corner. What I would say is this: if you are looking for a long, convivial meal that builds slowly and rewards patience, go upstairs. Brat is a restaurant for lingering – for sharing the turbot, for working through the wine list, for the kind of evening that you are still talking about a week later.
If you want something more immediate – louder, faster, built for drinking as much as eating, and likely to send you back out onto the street energised rather than contented – go downstairs. Smoking Goat is a restaurant for appetite and instinct, and it delivers on both counts every single time.
The best possible approach
The entirely legitimate third option, which I recommend without hesitation, is to do both on different days in quick succession and treat the comparison as the education it genuinely is. Lunch at one, dinner at the other, within the same week – by the end of it you will have a thorough understanding of why this corner building is one of the most interesting addresses in Shoreditch, and possibly a moderate obsession with chilli fish sauce.
The sixty seconds of indecision, it turns out, is the best problem this neighbourhood has ever given me.
