SlowBurn review: Restaurant in a Walthamstow jeans factory is an unexpected joy
Nothing says gentrification quite like a restaurant that pops up three times a week in a jeans factory in a commercial estate at the bleak end of Walthamstow.
Blackhorse Road is one of those enclaves of London that town planners forgot about until a few years ago, during which time it has gone from a series of grey warehouses and some reservoirs to one of the trendiest parts of the city, boasting eight breweries, a brandy distillery, at least three artisan bakeries, a handful of excellent coffee shops and, now, a genuinely decent restaurant.
There’s a kind of thrill when you walk into SlowBurn that comes from being somewhere that you probably shouldn’t. You’re flanked on either side by workbenches stacked high with cuts of denim. Strange industrial tubes coil from the ceiling and everywhere around are little boxes stuffed with rivets and zippers and whatever else is used to make jeans.
My table was at the far end of the factory floor, a few feet away from a vast industrial washing machine. There are only a few tables, perhaps enough for 25 or 30 covers (getting a table is difficult, book in advance), with the kitchen presumably purpose-built to feed the factory workers; considering eating dinner and making jeans are two entirely different categories of things, it’s a surprisingly light and pleasant place to dine.
The first question from our server was, of course, if we would like to have the menu concept explained to us, a sentence now so inevitable it’s starting to feel a bit like an inside joke. The concept is, as always, that there isn’t a concept – you order a bunch of stuff from different sections of the menu and share it, hoping that you manage to strike the right balance, which you never really do.
The SlowBurn menu is vaguely modern European – a useless descriptive I admit – with Asian and Nordic accents. “Healthy” and “sustainable” are the buzzwords here, with vegetables predominant throughout the menu and most dishes painted in various hues of green.
There were four of us and we essentially ordered everything on the menu. Scallops with pickled carrots and ginger and lemongrass sauce are an excellent coming together of simplicity and flavour, as is the perfectly executed asparagus and hollandaise (now sadly out of season).
Black bean “gyoza tacos” lacked the punch to really register but the cauliflower fritter with handsome little blobs of garlic aioli was far tasrtier than it had any right to be. Taglioni with basil pesto, manitou pesto and pecorino romano, from the “middle” section of the menu, is big enough to be a stand-alone main but is another excellent example of ingredient-led cooking, as were two huge salads of lion’s mane mushrooms and charred hispi (at this stage it became apparent we had ordered too much.)
Still to arrive were an exceptionally seasoned half roast chicken and – the star of the evening – lamb shoulder in a sea of neon green: peas, kohlrabi, confit shallots and wild garlic. A real belter of a dish.
There’s some really, really great cooking on display at SlowBurn – unflashy and without frills, as you would expect of a kitchen borrowed from an atelier. If more proof was needed that Blackhorse Road is now a destination, this is it (and I should know, I live there).
• SlowBurn, 114b Blackhorse Lane, Walthamstow, E17 6AA; 07541365064; book here