New Openings: Maos, Nuno Mendes' most intriguing outpost yet, hits Dalston
'Fine-dining’ undergoes a quiet transformation at Nuno Mendes’ Mãos
What’s new?
Cerebral Chiltern Firehouse chef Nuno Mendes can do more than fry crab doughnuts: his ‘kitchen, table and wine room’ Mãos (Portuguese for ‘hands’) at Shoreditch’s Blue Mountain School challenges the conventions of gastronomy.
Behind the scenes
This is the Mendes we know from his Dalston supper club days: thoughtful, inventive, fired up. Mãos is a partnership with James Brown, founder of luxury retailer Hostem and now Blue Mountain School, six floors of experimental, experiential art, fashion and eating on Redchurch Street.
The Concept
If I tell you it’s a collaborative, communal concept ‘dedicated to culinary freedom’ will you run a mile? Don’t, please, because it’s good, really good, just nothing so conventional as a mere restaurant.
Reservations at the 14-seat table are paid for in advance (£150 p.p, without wine), thus getting anything of an ugly transactional nature out of the way beforehand – no chip and PINs, no hostess desks, no clipboards.
Signage? Don’t be daft. Even the tryanny of tables and chairs is questioned as guests gather in the open kitchen ‒ over handshakes and how-are-yous with chef Edoardo Pellicano and co ‒ before being encouraged to explore the space freely over the following three hours.
Mendes compares it to a dinner party and certainly there’s something of that social awkwardness around the shared table initially (I try and fail to be cool with the communal aspect) but the small-talk is dispensed with quickly and we’re back in the bosom of our besties.
What’s cooking?
An exploratory 16-course menu that allows Mendes to push his ingredients, returning to them repeatedly to ask more of them, hence chicken (in fat, skin and bone broth forms) and asparagus (stalks, tips, fermented juice).
You’ll note he has a predilection for flavour-carrying fat and all-out umami which ensures even his more extraordinary combinations have tastiness on their side, for example reindeer moss fried in chicken fat, whose palate-invigorating sponge scourer texture is softened with an emollient layer of diaphanous cured pork fat.
Some dishes are no more than sushi-like morsels, eaten with the hands, e.g a square of Coombeshead sourdough with glazed tuna belly aged in beef fat and a mini beetroot blini with pickled onion and baby pink bone marrow.
Wines are chosen to flow across a number of courses, rather than rigorously matched to one. Bubbles from Austria’s Claus Preisinger and Jason Ligas’ natural Roditis from Greece work well in that regard.
Signature dishes
Mushroom and kombu chawanmushi. The sensation of eating this savoury egg custard, slicked with green gold olive oil, is intensely, shockingly physical. Served piping hot – so hot, it’s almost too hot – its slips silkily down the throat, radiating its incredible heat as it goes. Indescribably delicious.
Best for
Enlightened eaters.
Mãos, Blue Mountain School, 41 Redchurch Street, London, E2 7DJ; bluemountain.school
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