IGNI needs to be on your list, whether you’re visiting London this summer or you already live here. It’s only been open a short time and we’ve been telling everyone we can about it. Here’s the thing that makes it different: every single dish on the tasting menu is cooked over fire. Not “finished” over fire, not one grilled course among many. All of it. No gas, no oven backup.
But don’t picture a steakhouse. This is proper fine dining that just happens to run entirely on wood and embers, and you feel that distinction the second the first course lands.
Chef Theo Clench, who has a track record of taking restaurants to a Michelin star, runs several different grills at once, each with its own job. There’s an asado grill for cooking bread directly over the embers, a konro grill fed with binchotan charcoal for the fish, and a few more besides, each paired with different woods, beech and oak among them. It’s not one fire doing everything, it’s a whole system, and watching it is half the experience.
Book the chef’s counter. We sat there and it made the whole meal. Unlike most chef’s tables, the seats are genuinely comfortable, and you get a front row seat to the entire operation.
The room is sleek rather than rustic. A long central hearth runs through the open kitchen, and a spiral staircase leads down to a cellar with a well-curated wine list and a glass aging room where turbot and tuna hang in cool, moody light. It’s dramatic without trying too hard.
A few dishes we’re still thinking about. The tuna, though, is the one I keep bringing up: served three ways, including a cracker made from the bloodline (the part that usually gets thrown away, which I love) and fatty tuna dressed with aged foie gras fat. The oyster came dressed with seaweed, cucumber, and nasturtium, the prettiest thing on the table, almost too pretty to eat.
Don’t skip the Yukon gold course either. It sounds humble on paper, “potato”, but it’s actually a bread made with potato, grilled on the asado, served with butter and a charred vegetable broth. It’s a lunch supplement, but worth adding on for this alone.
We also watched chef Theo smoke duck slowly over smoldering herbs, its own quiet piece of theatre, and even the mignardises get a quick sear from the binchotan grill right at the table before they reach you. A small touch, but it tells you nobody’s phoning it in by dessert.
Book it, get the chef’s counter, and go hungry.
Notes: IGNI provided support for the reporting of this story.