Betty and Fatima both work at Cue Point, the Texas-Afghan barbecue restaurant that recently opened in Notting Hill. Rather than cooks, however, the pair are equipment that form the backbone of chefs Mursal Saiq and Joshua Moroney’s innovative, creative and inclusive latest project. Betty is an American barrel smoker in which Cue Point’s briskets are slow cooked for hours at a time while Fatima is an Argentinian style asado grill on which the restaurant’s skewers are cooked over a fierce live fire.
The two were combined at one point, but Saiq says that Fatima always felt like an adjunct to the US smoker and so decided to split them and give them their own identities. Thus, Betty is located at the entrance to the large outside space at the Garden Bar Grill and Smokehouse that serves the majority of Cue Point’s covers while Fatima is part of a second separate outside kitchen. As a customer, it is almost impossible to walk into Cue Point and not be beguiled by the perfumed smoke or the fizzing flames of both as you take your seat for a barbecue experience unlike any other the capital - or indeed the country - has to offer.
“I’ve been obsessed with American low and slow cooking, I know everything there is to know about it,” says Saiq when we meet for dinner on a hot summer’s day in August practically crying out for grilled and smoked meats and cold beer. “Fatima was at the back of the smoker and was always an add on but then I went to Brazil and was blown away by live fire and asado cooking so we welded her some legs and gave her her own lease of life.”
From Kabul to Notting Hill
Cutting a diminutive figure, Saiq is by no means your typical barbecue pit master (or pit mistress, as she calls herself). In a sector of the industry that is particularly dominated by men and many of the trappings of masculinity in the chef world, Saiq is as individual as the Afghan Texas confluence cooking of Cue Point. What she might lack in height, she more than makes up for in other ways, not just in her mastery at the smoker but in her determination for making her craft much more inclusive and her unfiltered views on hospitality in general.
Such a fierce stance is perhaps an inevitable product of Saiq’s background. Born in Kabul in Afghanistan to middle class parents, she and her family fled the country and the Taliban at around the age of six during the Civil War of the 1990s. Initially moving to Mumbai in India, she later came to England, first to North London and later to Hackney, where she found a sense of belonging among the area’s diverse community of refugees and immigrants.
In London she studied history at Goldsmiths as well as political philosophy at UCL-School of Slavonic Centre and Eastern European Studies as well as doing stints at the British Museum and British Library, and while her knowledge of the subjects is evident when she speaks, she says she ultimately found it ‘terribly boring’. Wanting to do an internship but needing the funds to support her, she ended up working at Jonathan Downey’s Street Feast, where she met Moroney (she recalls him bribing security with meat so they’d carry his charcoal and wood upstairs) and SMOKESTAK founder David Carter, who was to become her mentor and set her on her barbecue path.
I wanted to test out if people were nicer to a white woman. And they were way more polite to Sandra than they were to Mursal
This path has taken Saiq and Moroney on a journey across the capital that has built a loyal following and blazed a trail everywhere it has popped up over the past decade. These include residencies at Orbit Brewery and Taproom in Walworth, Juju’s Bar in the Truman Brewery and at White City food court W12 Studios, opposite the BBC studios (Louis Theroux was a regular customer, I’m told), which became a victim of the Covid lockdowns. In the period during lockdown the pair were among the first to pivot to delivery BBQ boxes, catching the eye of Jay Rayner in the process, and in 2021 Cue Point also operated the first halal BBQ drive-thru in the UK in Chiswick.
“We were the first smokehouse to pivot online, there was no down period or a moment of making sourdough in my house,” Saiq says proudly, although admitting that it didn’t quite go to plan in the early days with food being delivered wrapped in tin foil (it was later vac-packed). “We hadn’t idiot-proofed it,” she continues. “People were ruining my food and then complaining to me.”
An outspoken advocate for racial equity within the industry, Saiq used this experience to expose an all-too common prejudice, creating a pseudonym to deal with any complaints to see if she were treated differently. “I called myself Sandra because I had to separate myself from it,” she says of the number of calls she had to deal with during lockdown, some to complain, others to just vent to a person out of loneliness. “She wasn’t real, but I wanted to test out if people were nicer to a white woman. And they were way more polite to Sandra than they were to Mursal.”
There was even a period where she pretended to be a white man called Jonathan (presumably over email this time) and the response was equally telling. “They were even nicer to him,” she says with a smile. “The absolute fuckers!”
Saiq has faced many other challenges in the decade of running Cue Point, including abuse and theft. Two signs she bought for the Notting Hill opening, one with the words ‘Welcome to Kabul’ that she got from Afghanistan and which she describes as a “really important touch point” for the restaurant and another depicting two Afghan girls in miniskirts (a reflection of Saiq’s rebellious side) were stolen within the first weeks of trading. She also recalls the aggressive nature of some customers in the early days of the Notting Hill restaurant when it was selling out of meat (“a good problem to have but it was tough”) and of others mansplaining BBQ techniques to her.
The biggest setback, however, was the theft of one of her smokers while in Chiswick, which she describes as “the saddest experience of my life”. “It had the flavours I wanted it to have,” she recollects, glancing protectively over at Betty as she speaks. “Betty now has that. She is cooked in with my flavours; you can never replicate it. The flavour profiles of Cue Point are instilled in Betty.”
Inclusive barbecue
It is setbacks like these, piled onto the of travails of Saiq’s early life, that have served to galvanise rather than be a deterrent. Cue Point seems as much a product of facing prejudices and fighting against them as it is of a passion for BBQ, with Saiq using cooking to tear down barriers and remove obstacles for people while at the same time nourishing them.
Inclusivity is a word she uses a lot and which is the bedrock of Cue Point. The restaurant is halal and, unusually for a BBQ concept but for religious reasons, it does not sell pork. Saiq recalls an event called Pork Life in Dalston Yard at which she worked back in 2014 and was struck by how it excluded many of her friends who don’t eat the meat.
“I invited about 10 to 15 people and that was fascinating because they could not eat a thing because they had Hindu or kosher diet requirements. People often don’t realise that Muslims and Jews are a very affluent market. My sister is a doctor; my brothers is an accountant. There are enough kebab houses and Indian places to have the usual food, but I found it mind-boggling that somebody from these backgrounds couldn’t have a beef rib or some pastrami or something a bit more refined or on the scene. People seem to assume that Muslims don’t eat out or drink or fuck and they are really missing a trick.”
Cue Point, then, is the antidote, a place where Afghans can come and have a pint of Guinness and a kabuli (an Afghan pilaf dish) and feel a sense of belonging. “There are a lot of Afghan restaurants where the men can drink but as a female, I could not invite my friends of multiple different ethnicities and go out for some drinks and food. I’ve found my Afghans,” she says of her clientele.
I sometimes feel our entire industry is based on cultural exotica that we pay little or no homage to. That’s a form of passive segregation that I can’t be part of
These ‘inbetweeners’ as she affectionately calls them include meeting her first Jamaican Afghan (“she speaks Farsi like you wouldn’t believe”) who had never been able to go to a restaurant such as Cue Point before, a Welsh Afghan lady, and a girl whose fiancée is English and whose family has disowned her and who has become one of Cue Point’s biggest customers as well as a close friend.
Cue Point’s clientele extends well beyond its Afghan roots, however. Over the past decade it has built a strong and growing following helped along the way at various stages by glowing reviews. One in Time Out Worldwide a month ago said it was ‘maybe the best barbeque we’ve ever eaten’ while Rayner gave it a favourable writeup in the FT. With each review fresh interest in Cue Point is piqued.
“I love our customers,” says Saiq. “They are an intelligent and very compassionate group. You know your Cue Point audience, it’s like a cult to them, but we are seeing new customers here too.” With each different publication’s review comes new people. “We know the FT customers by sight,” she laughs. “They come in with the clipping and order everything that was written in the piece. Time Out readers are a more professional, hipster, pretends to be liberal but not really crowd.”
Afghan-Texas fusion
What unites every customer is the food which, despite the growth in the UK’s BBQ scene over the past decade, remains in a category of one with its Afghan-Texas fusion. Except to look at the menu you might not instantly twig, with dishes on the chalkboard such as beef rib; live-fire chicken; oak smoked lamb shank, and wagyu brisket steak not giving much away.
“It’s not authentic, that’s not what we’re about” Saiq says proudly of the food. “And I don’t give too much away. I like people to find out what we’re about once they’ve ordered.”
Once they have, only then does the unusual combination of flavour and techniques become apparent. The wagyu brisket is served with a Texas naan and cowboy butter, which Saiq says is very different to the Indian style of bread many in the UK are familiar with. “In Texas you get a piece of Texas toast, which is white bread with some butter. In Kabul and any Afghan restaurant, it’s not Afghan if they don’t bake their bread daily, and it’s naan, but it’s our version. We’ve taken the Texas concept of cowboy butter and the fluffiness of naan and baked it like a naan because I don’t want toast. It’s a perfect amalgamation of Texas and Afghanistan.”
While the brisket is “one thing I don’t really mess with” says Saiq, not wanting to stray too far from Carter’s teaching at SMOKESTAK, other dishes are gloriously inauthentic. The oak smoked lamb shank is an Afghan dish that is based on kabuli pilau, the national dish of Afghanistan made with slow cooked lamb and pilau rice, but with a Texan twist.
First an authentic brine is made - onion and cardamom is blitzed with some rock salt, a little bit of black lime, some sumac and toasted cumin - which is traditionally rubbed over the lamb. The difference here is that the lamb is first placed in a smoker with just salt and pepper to colour it before being brined and then spending a further eight hours in the pit. “The onion jus turns into something I’ve never seen, which you don’t get in Afghanistan or Texas, which we pour over the rice. It’s an Afghan recipe Texan cooked.”
Cultural identity
Saiq’s embracement of the inauthentic and a willingness to combine cuisines is refreshing but unusual for a chef from overseas cooking on these shores. While she questions the notion of authenticity - Saiq’s US teaching and Afghan heritage are both authentic to her - she has strident views on the issue of culture and identity in the hospitality sector.
“I sometimes feel our entire industry is based on cultural exotica that we pay little or no homage to,” she says. “That’s a form of passive segregation that I can’t be part of. As an Afghan woman, I’d be denying myself if I did.”
She says she has no truck with people cooking other culture’s cuisines but does want there to be greater understanding with how it is done. “It’s fine for middle class white men to be cooking our dishes, I don’t think they should be robbed of that, but there should be a level of education that I think some lack,” she says.
I love Anthony Bourdain for what he did later in his life. In his younger years I thought he was an entitled, privileged young white man that had used some level of his anger and alcoholism to bring him up
“We often talk about food in an elitist inaccessible way that almost scares me. Food is something we all have. The way we speak about dishes and the way we cite them, we could give a little bit of homage to where we got them from and bring unification through food not segregation. The people you source ingredients from, for example, could feature a lot more than they do, even if the chef just mentioned them.”
The conversation inevitably turns to Tony, the film that charts the career of a young Anthony Bourdain. Saiq says she was a fan of the chef-turned-food explorer so has she seen it? “Have I fuck! I full out refuse to,” is the unambiguous response. It seems an odd stance for someone she admires, and Saiq is happy to elaborate.
“Everyone says they love Anthony Bourdain, but the film Tony disgusts me. I imagine Bourdain in his grave looking at the stupid fucking placard that says Tony with all the influencers posing for their picture in front of it, he’d just die all over again, wouldn’t he? I love that man for what he did later in his life. In his younger years I thought he was an entitled, privileged young white man that had used some level of his anger and alcoholism to bring him up. But then he changed his concept of food from New York to travelling the world. He went to Palestine and across the world and that’s when his depression really came in when he realised he’d been doing it fucking wrong, cooking other people’s food and exploring their ingredients but not exploring the chain of where those ingredients came from and the hands behind them.
“There’s a concept in physics of energy transference that when you touch something and cook something and change the chemical reaction there is a transference so the person cooking you something puts that energy into that. I’m a firm believer in that.”
Plans for growth
With such fire and ambition even the capacious space of Notting Hill’s Garden Bar Grill and Smokehouse isn’t enough for Saiq. She tells me of plans that are underway to build a new, larger kitchen area (“half of my life I spend with a welder”) outside and of her idea to rebrand the space as ‘Cue Gardens’ to give it more of an identity (and to have some wordplay fun in the process).
She also intends to reactivate the e-commerce element of the business that performed so well in lockdowns because she says she still gets messages from her inbetweeners outside of the capital pining for the brisket and lamb they were once able to get their hands on.
There will be other restaurants, too, she promises, probably with a more Afghan focus. “I want a little empire of Afghan restaurants,” she says.
At this point the food comes, the lamb with the rich green sauce and fluffy rice, familiar but also unusual; the smoked brisket with an unfeasibly large naan and pickles; a salad of cucumbers, red onions, tomatoes, parsley, mint, and lemon juice to cut through the fat and smoke and Afghan-Texas barbecue suddenly all makes sense.