Smokey Tails – review
Smokey Tails: ‘The place is on fire’
London is not that good at relaxing.
Sometimes it feels like a relentless shunt and grunt of early starts and over-crowded tubes, barrelling toward Friday night when you find yourself crushed in a 10-person deep queue at the bar for a round of grimy shots.
Over it? Well, I have just the place for you.
Sprawling down by the canal in Hackney Wick, Smokey Tails is a BBQ-cum-waterside bar-cum-chillout joint and music pop-up that opened earlier this year.
Open Thursday to Sunday, it serves treacherously good frozen watermelon and tequila cocktails, boasts some of the best pulled pork I’ve tasted and has great resident DJs on tap.
You can watch the sun set over the water in the evening as the lights start twinkling around the tables and the place begins to fill up.
Sometimes co-owner Seth Troxler even turns up for a surprise set.
But best of all, it feels like a secret hideaway far from the crush and rush of the working week.
The menu is simple, but everything I tasted was sensational.
The pork is smoked for 18 hours with apple wood, and it literally melts off the fork.
It comes with pickled cabbage in a sweet bun and I could have eaten it all evening.
We also tried the ribs, which are reportedly made to Troxler’s mum’s recipe.
The sauce is currently being bottled in the US and rightly so, because the ribs were juicy and sweet and over too soon.
There is also a vibrant selection of seasonal salads fresh from the Smokey Tails veg patch, so it couldn’t be more local and all the meat is sourced from high-welfare farms.
We tried a bright and zingy three-beetroot salad and some peppery leaves with roasted fennel that tasted full of the last rays of harvest sun.
Basically it’s great. But then it should be; Smokey Tails is born of festival and events royalty, with not just Troxler, but collaborators including the creative minds from Secret Garden Party and Eastern Electrics at the helm.
It’s open air, but there are piles of comfy sofas and recliners, heaters, blankets and hot water bottles when the evenings turn chilly.
The mantra is ‘sit back and relax’.
It’s hard not to.
Smokey Tails is still open for a couple of weeks, so check it out while you still can.
And luckily when this venue shuts up shop for the winter the Smokey Tails team is planning to open an indoor space to ride out the cold months.
So watch this space.
The Container Yard
119 Wallis Road
Hackney Wick
E9 5L