For someone used to cooking at Kiln - one of Soho’s smallest restaurants, where diners sit around a counter and watch chefs prepare fiery Thai food in clay pots mere feet from them - Meedu Saad’s debut solo venture in Soho could be considered a departure. Yes, Impala will have a counter around which 10 or so people can sit in front of a wood-fired oven, and a four-seat chef’s counter close to the grill and at the heart of the action, but the Dean Street site is also home to a sizeable dining room and bar area.
In total, Impala can hold around 80-90 covers - Saad is a bit woolly on the exact numbers - with much of the dining done either at tables in the buzzy front part of the restaurant near the bar or to the rear, where light from four huge skylights floods the area.
“It is much bigger than Kiln, but it has elements of it,” says Saad, as he walks through the almost finished restaurant. “We’ve got counter seats and we’ve pulled the bar right into the room, so it has that element of Kiln at the front. But it will be nice to explore the back room and that style of dining, which is quite different.”
Any similarities with Kiln, where Saad remains a co-owner, end there. Impala is a restaurant the likes of which haven’t been seen in London before, and certainly not in Soho. It is a very personal project that has involved many journeys, conversations and meals and which brings to the table the flavours of north Africa and the dishes of Saad’s past, both in Africa and North London where he grew up. It is a restaurant steeped in experiences, of smells and flavours and textures that have left an indelible imprint on Saad’s memory. Even the name is deeply personal, referencing the cherry red 1964 Chevrolet Impala Saad drove around during his summers in Egypt.
Joining the Super 8 stable
Opening in partnership with Super 8, the group behind London restaurants Brat, Smoking Goat and Mountain, the road to Impala has been slightly different to that of the group’s other sites.
“To begin with the menu was broadly built on memories,” says Saad. “Ben [Chapman, Super 8’s co-founder] and I talked about it and what we usually do is go straight to the source and try to learn what we can (as was the case with Smoking Goat and Kiln). We then come back and try to use what we have around us to relay those dishes and stories. This was slightly different because it was a longer lead project and we intentionally didn’t do that.”
Instead, Saad used the memory of dishes he had tasted on his visits to Egypt throughout his childhood and teens and the emotions they evoked as his jumping off point. “When you think back you always tend to remember something fondly and you cook with idealism,” he says. “It was good to lean into that and begin with the memory and then dial that in. Then we did the research and worked out the building blocks of what makes the dish the best it can be. It gave a different level of depth to some of the dishes.”
Such dishes include fish baked in bran around the community ovens in Ismailia, clams cooked over small fires along the beaches of the Red Sea, and those cooked by his grandmother “that just ended up on the dinner table”. One particular occasion stands out, of picking mangoes on a farmhouse and the ensuing meal that featured the fruit served with bounteous rice dishes and roasted ducks. “That left such a vivid memory,” says Saad. “I spoke to Ben early on about that dish. It sounds really romantic, but it could also be a really cool dish.”
A five-year project
Five years in the making, Impala’s gestation period has given Saad time to consider every element of the restaurant. “It’s been a lovely project in the sense that I’ve had time,” he says. “We’ve had the time to hand select everything, sit on the chairs, find the right wood. But the thing with time is that minds change as well and you need to be OK with letting some things go and keeping the things that are special. That’s been an interesting process.”
The time frame was partly down to Covid, with the initial idea for Impala discussed on a pre-Covid trip to Thailand, but it has also been down to site selection. Saad says he was very stubborn about his restaurant being in Soho, which ultimately narrowed the options and “took up a chunk of the time”.
“I love London and all its boroughs, but this project started about this community oven, a heat source that feeds the community. I really do feel Soho does that for London, it is the beating heart of hospitality. There is so much legacy here on Dean Street alone - Jeremy Lee with Quo Vadis, The French House, Barrafina. It’s a privilege to be able to cook on this street.”
I realised that I had to be OK with sharing everything, not just a little bit, and not care if people like it or not
The site he settled on occupies a large space within a 1960s concrete building that combines parquet flooring and a zinc-topped bar with concrete pillars. To one side of the room is the kitchen area, including a wood-fired oven set in concrete (pictured below) and a charcoal grill, while opposite is a bar area. To the rear of the restaurant there is another drinks station where wine on tap will be poured and another large dining area, while to the front there are big windows that can be pulled completely open in the summer months.
There will also be a bespoke speaker system made from repurposed cinema horns, although that was yet to be installed for fear of breakage by the tradespeople carrying out the finishing touches on the site. The overall intention is to bring some of chaos of Cairo to Soho and create a space of contradictions - the back dining room, for example, will have a very different vibe in the evenings when the light no longer floods in.
“Cairo is a pretty intense city with lots of juxtapositions,” says Saad. “When Ben took me to Bangkok for first time he told me to prepare myself because it’s a mentally busy city. But when I got there, I said it was like the countryside. When I took Ben to Cairo, he understood what I meant. Cairo has an intensity that is not for everyone but that’s one of the things we wanted to build into the front of the restaurant. There is a different energy in each space.”
This project started about this community oven, a heat source that feeds the community. I really do feel Soho does that for London
Having a dining room, rather than just a counter, has also meant further considerations, and Saad has appreciated thinking about the restaurant in a more holistic way. “I’ve enjoyed deepening the connection from a plate of food on the pass to a plate of food on the table. The glassware, the table itself, the light above your head, all those impact the food and we need to be thinking about that when are developing a dish. You can get to a certain point by tasting it on the pass but you’re never going to get all of it.”
The room, as well as the team and what’s available from suppliers, will all play a part in Impala’s offer. The menu might be based on an anthology of dishes that have traversed the years, but the here and now will be just as informative, with some dishes created ad hoc on the day of service based on the day’s weather, the skill set of the team in the kitchen, and the season.
“I have the backbone of things and will then work with my team. I want them to have some ownership over what they are cooking. You don’t build a dish on micro seasons [of ingredients], but you embrace them when they come and hopefully that makes what you have already even more memorable. That energy makes it exciting.”
A restaurant with energy
If there’s one thing any restaurant in the Super 8 stable isn’t short of is energy. From the high tempo Smoking Goat and Kiln, where flame and smoke permeate the air, to the thrum of Brat both in Shoreditch and Climpson’s Arch and the buzz of Mountain, the group’s restaurants are known as much or their convivial atmosphere as they are the quality of cooking and the ingredients.
With two restaurants in Soho - Mountain on Beak Street and Kiln on Brewer Street – already and Smoking Goat having its origins there before it moved from Denmark Street in 2018, few businesses know the area as well as Super 8. With Saad having spent a large chunk of his time at Super 8 - he has been at Kiln since 2019 and before that worked in the original Smoking Goat - Soho is almost a second home for the north Londoner.
Despite having spent the best part of a decade cooking Thai food, Saad began his career in more traditional French vein. He may have stayed in that line of cuisine had Ali Borer, then head chef at Smoking Goat, not asked him to help out at the Soho restaurant.
The experience left a lasting impression and has been an inspiration for how he has approached his cooking ever since. “I remember that site well,” he says. “It had the bare minimum, a proper basic kitchen, but I loved the energy and the ideals of the company and that even though a bit of the roof was missing and it rained on half your shoulder while you were grilling they also had the best produce, better than most people, because Ben was drilling down on that.
When you think back you always tend to remember something fondly and you cook with idealism. It was good to lean into that and begin with the memory and then dial that in
“It was a tiny place using unbelievably good produce that was head and shoulders above so many other restaurants. It installed an energy in me to want to cook food with really good produce and have a relationship with the farmers that goes beyond sending an email. They are almost like a member of our team.”
At Impala the sourcing is impeccable. Led by head of sourcing SongSoo Kim, the restaurant is founded upon long-term farming projects as well as new ones, including a project with Moss, a farm in Exmoor National Park, where animals are used throughout the seasons, as they grow from lambs to mutton to ewes. It also has a long-standing relationship with Cornwall-based fish supplier Kernow Sashimi so it can serve ike jime prepared seabass and bream.
Other ingredients that will form part of Impala’s pantry include green figs from Namayasai Farm near Lewes in East Sussex preserved in honey, salt-packed greengages and gooseberries, peppers and aubergines that have been fermented with walnuts and chilli and preserved in Cretan olive oil.
Time to shine
With the opening date of 26 March fast approaching, Saad’s five-year journey to opening Impala is coming to an end, and the job of running it will soon begin. For such a personal project, finally having people be part of his experiences comes with mixed emotions.
“The hardest thing in this project is realising that it doesn’t matter how close the concept is to you, you have to give it away,” he says. “It took a bit of time for me. I’m quite a private person and this is what I do every day of my life.”
One moment that really hit home was when he took Chapman to his aunt’s house in Egypt. “I realised that I had to be OK with sharing everything, not just a little bit, and not care if people like it or not. But also to remember that it’s only lunch and dinner - there are people doing way more important things.”
That said, Impala has potential to become a London restaurant of import. “I really believe in the work we’ve done. We’ve gone far afield and spent a lot of time trying to make sure the food is something new and exciting and is what people want to enjoy and talk about.
“If Impala can be one of those places where people really want to go, then that’s more than enough for me.”