Address: 14-15 Hoxton Market, London, N1 6HG, United Kingdom
Style: Restaurant bar
Food: Set menu
This Shoreditch offshoot of Meat Liquor takes over a former church hall in this cobbled square next to Hoxton Square. There's less graffiti and it feels more overtly designed, with a series of twisted stained glass images throughout the venue that nod to its religious past, lending this mission's fervour for meat and cocktails a practically evangelical dimension. Amen!
Drinks are served from behind a circular island bar made of interlocking metal panels that looks like a fairground attraction. Expect a similar menu to Meat Liquor, with a 12-strong list of well-conceived and simple drinks expertly executed without pretension and served alongside your choice of guilty pleasure, calorie-laden comfort food. Snigger-worthy names of drinks mask imaginative flavour combinations - the Donkey Punch mixing vodka, lime, ginger beer and absinthe, the powerful Game Over combining six types of alcohol (limited to two per person), most between £7 and £9.
A sense of fun pervades this concept, and extends to the food, perhaps articulated best by the choice of 'garbage' plates - imagine progressive layers of chips, chilli, burgers, cheese and mustard and it's a schoolboy's delight of grotesque but irresistible proportions. Might mean you avoid that kebab on the way home too!