The rise of the open-fire restaurant

Burn the formal white tablecloths and fling open the kitchen doors. The latest craze in restaurant culture is open-fire cooking – where chefs sweat it out over roaring flames in full view of their customers. And the simple, raw nature of this method of food preparation seems to have set diners’ imaginations alight. 

‘Cooking outside over flames is primal and in our DNA as human beings,’ says Andrew Clarke, co-founder of Acme Fire Cult – one such restaurant in Dalston, north London. ‘The smell of woodsmoke and animal fats hitting the hot coals stirs up something deep inside.’ For Tomos Parry, chef and co-owner of Brat – another open-fire restaurant – the flavour that can be achieved from this style of cooking adds an extra dimension to most dishes. ‘All of your five senses are engaged,’ he says. 

The sensory nature of the experience is important, too. Hearing the crackle of coals, smelling the wood char and watching the beads of perspiration on the chefs adds an energy that closed-kitchen eateries cannot match.