From North Africa to Europe at London's Impala restaurant

When the chef Meedu Saad was a teenager, he spent long summers visiting his cousins in Ismailia, a city in Egypt, driving around in an ember-red Chevy Impala, fishing and barbecuing on the beach. Those languorous holidays proved more influential than most: this month Saad, with the backing of the restaurant group Super 8, opens Impala in London’s Soho. The menu, he says, spans “the whole of north Africa and its connections to the south of Europe,” and is filtered through a decade in classical French kitchens, eight years at the Thai restaurant Kiln, and a lifetime in north London.

Saad makes heavy use of the grill but veers away from sharing cuts of meat. English produce is the star of the show. The wine list is concise. On a recent visit, puffy rounds of an Egyptian bread (aish baladi), appeared first. Then came mellow Greek cheeses lacquered with honey, and ducks marinated in black lime and molasses, grilled hot and fast and served with both black and white Tunisian figs. Sea-salted olives cut through the creaminess of fondant potatoes, simmered in chicken stock and bay leaves, then browned in clarified butter.

With yet more dishes, we were suddenly on the Barbary Coast in north Africa, but with Scottish langoustines replacing the lamb in kibbeh, and Devon ducks served with a sauce that’s finished with the iron-rich juices extracted from the carcasses.

Much of Impala’s menu is possible thanks to SongSoo Kim, Super 8’s head of sourcing, who Saad describes as “the master fixer”. When I visited she had just returned from two days in Tunisia, where she was tracing harissa, and she was filling the kitchen’s walk-in fridge with rare citrus to pickle and bright-green pistachios for Saad’s sole dessert, a salted date and pistachio tart.

“In Cairo, Meedu kept drawing me to in-between spaces, like a restaurant that seemed to exist between two separate buildings,” Ben Chapman, co-founder of the Super 8 group, tells me. Impala exists in a blockish 1950s building at 14 Dean Street. Chapman looked to the work of Italian modernist Carlo Scarpa for inspiration, layering materials and corralling light. A wide-set room is filled with nooks, and screens run between the wooden joinery and cement columns. Two industrial skylights stretch the length of the dining room, which is lined with swirled veneer panels. Outside of service, Impala looks serene. But the room is buoyed by the quick movements of the grill, visible from almost every seat.

Chapman and Saad have been plotting this restaurant for years, over the counter at Kiln, and on research trips to Cairo and Marseille. “I think for a period of time, Meedu was finding out what he wanted to say about his food,” Chapman says. “Becoming a father was the trigger for me,” explains Saad, who began studying the dishes he grew up eating during summers spent in Egypt around his son’s birth in 2020. On one trip, Saad took Chapman to his aunt’s home in Ismailia, where they ate whole fish baked in a bran crust. Before Impala, Maad says, “No one would serve dishes like these in a restaurant – not even in Egypt.”

impalasoho.com