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Jimi Famurewa reviews Flank at the Print House: Barbecue in need of careful, focused execution

The bone marrow and potato slice at Flank
The bone marrow and potato slice at Flank

Ambience: 3/5

Food: 2/5

I don’t know if you’ve ever had the wholly unrealistic desire to hit rewind on a minor life decision, but that is how I feel about my lunchtime trip to Flank at the Print House in Stratford.

To be clear: not everything I ate was irredeemably bad at this long-term kitchen residency, the biggest of chef Tom Griffiths’ three London outposts. It is more that my pre-visit fondness for the food — a lively, carnivorous whirl of brisket naans, gravy-slopped beef cheek dumplings and pork crackling sticky rice that I’d been passionately tracking on Instagram — was such that I wish I hadn’t let reality rupture the fantasy.

When I made my way to Flank’s windblown, oddly deserted stretch of E15, I was propelled by a pure, burning excitement. I left with the feeling that I had caught a kitchen on a bad day. And, perhaps, that in this age of fledgling food concepts with sites scattered across multiple food courts, markets and pub takeovers, I had encountered a living parable on the dangers of spreading yourself too thin.

There were early signs that something was ever so slightly amiss. Beneath an ominous grey sky, my mate Dan and I eased past two crouching guys in hard hats, through a waterside terrace hemmed in by construction hoardings, and found a cavernous, echoey hall that we virtually had to ourselves. There was woodsmoke in the air and a sharing menu split into ‘snacks’, ‘plates’ and ‘sides’.

Cavernous, echoey hall: the interior at Flank
Cavernous, echoey hall: the interior at Flank

Your choices arrive all at once on a comically huge metal tray; a decision that tracks as an authentic nod to Deep South barbecue culture but does also mean that you are forced to decide which dish you are most happy to eat slightly cold. Smoked cheese ‘nugs’ brought three croquettes (strangely low on both bonfire musk and sharpness) on an eerily flavourless, chive-swirled garlic ‘pizza dip’ that was optimistically described to us as ‘like the one at Domino’s’. Smokiness in the barbecued cabbage, on the other hand, was overpowering to the point of inedibility: a forceful exhaust-belch that tasted synthetic (we were told, chirpily, that it absolutely was not) and lurked unseen on each scorched, slightly clammy leaf.

There was further waywardness: limp, timidly fired naan with a pot of passable burnt end beef; fairly cloying barbecue glazed pig head and trotter patties in stiff mini sub rolls. Then, blessedly, some glimmers of hope. The mini double cheeseburger, coarse-ground with yellow goo dribbling between rare-cooked crags, was effective. A block of fine-crisped potato gratin came drenched in a fragrant, gutsy pan stock and blobbed (a little messily) in a scoop of bone marrow butter. And the deep-fried apple slice with caramel ice cream — a riff on the famed McDonald’s mouth-stripper — may have lacked the requisite thin, bubbled pastry but it offered a rushing flood of buttered, cinnamon-spiked sweetness.

We finished our drinks, stepped outside and tried to process it all. I don’t think Flank’s popularity at its Market Hall Victoria and Spitalfields berths is a total mirage. But my visit did hammer home that enticing gastronomic trigger terms — ‘beef fat’ this and ‘smoked’ that — don’t amount to much without careful, focused execution. There is probably a good, fairly priced barbecue joint hiding here. But like the development sites heralded by cranes that still crowd the sky in this part of town, it hasn’t quite come together yet.