An 8pm Saturday reservation at Impala is a golden ticket. Not metaphorically, literally the most coveted table in London right now, only possible if you set a reminder and refresh the booking page obsessively in the moments before reservations open 28 days out. We got ours. We went with two of our best friends, Ally and Dave, and I’m happy to report it was worth every obsessive refresh.
The room is candlelit, buzzing. Big enough that you’re not sitting on top of your neighbours, small enough to still feel intimate. Super 8’s fingerprints are all over it… if you’ve been to Mountain, you’ll recognise the DNA, although Impala somehow feels more lived in. The open kitchen runs along one wall, the charcoal grill and wood fired oven dominating the space, glossy bronzed ducks hanging above the flames.
We started with both bread options from the oven. The aish baladi (Egyptian flatbread), chewy and slightly charred, is good. But it’s the honey and olive oil bread that stopped the table. Subtle sweetness, the kind of bread course where you want to pace yourself because you know what’s coming, but still can’t stop tearing into it.
The crab kibbeh came next. The heat doesn’t show up instantly, it’s a slow uncovering. The pounded white beans with wild herbs and bottarga arrived looking almost humble, a beige smear on a plate, and then delivered one of the most startling mouthfuls of the evening. Bottarga’s salt, the grassy bite of the herbs, the beans as a creamy base for everything else. Don’t be fooled, this is much more than your average bean dip.
The beef tartare with baklouti (a Tunisian chili, fruity and mild, the pepper at the heart of harissa) was sensational. Served with a fried crouton.
Then the short rib arrived, and we hit the one stumble of the night. I wanted to love it, but the ratio of fat to meat was so unbalanced we could barely eat it. We set it aside.
What followed more than recovered. The birds tongue pasta with spiced oxtail, and I should note that James spent a good two minutes at the ordering stage genuinely, earnestly trying to convince me this was pasta made from actual bird tongues. It is not. It’s the literal translation of the Arabic name, lisan al-asfour… it’s simply what they call orzo. It arrived in a deep bowl with the most tender oxtail, spiced in a way that’s warming and subtle, cinnamon appearing somewhere in the middle of each bite.
The duck roasted in molasses with fig sauce has been the most talked about dish since Impala opened, so of course we had to see what all the fuss was about. Stuffed with black lime spice paste, roasted slowly over the fire. The fig sauce brings sweetness without weight. We ordered it with the freekeh with pickled grilled onion, the smokiness of the grain cutting through the duck’s richness. In retrospect, this was the perfect order.
We finished with the date and pistachio custard tart, the only dessert on the menu. It’s a little salty, a little sweet, and the base is as good as pastry gets. I understand why they don’t offer anything else, nothing else is needed.
There’s a bigger question lurking underneath all of this. Super 8 has a history of changing the direction of London dining. When Brat opened in Shoreditch in 2018, wood fire cooking wasn’t new, Tomos Parry drew it from the Basque tradition, but Brat made it a London obsession. Within a few years, a wood fired oven was a design statement as much as a cooking technique, and it’s now in kitchens across every price point and London postcode. Super 8 made London fall in love with fire.
North African food has never had that moment in London. There are restaurants doing it, but no restaurant has made it feel modern and unmissable in the way that Impala already does after just a few months. The Mediterranean boom is well underway, Greek and Turkish cooking is everywhere, and rightly so. But Egyptian, Tunisian, the North African charcoal tradition that Saad is working from, that gap in London’s dining culture is real, and Impala is, as far as I can tell, the first serious attempt to fill it.
Whether it has the same downstream effect as Brat, whether we’re eating pounded white beans with bottarga in restaurants across the city in five years, I genuinely don’t know. But I’m watching closely.
And in the meantime, I’ll be refreshing that bookings page.
Table for Two lives at the intersection of food and culture, not simply recommendations, but a considered point of view on why dining matters, and where to find the best of London's table culture. If this piece resonated, please support us by subscribing.
I am still thinking about this meal! A perfect recap of a perfect dinner