Smoking Goat, London, restaurant review: Bangkok bustle on Shoreditch High Street

Before we start raving about the food at The Smoking Goat – which, with a couple of small caveats, we are ­going to be doing – we should pause to salute whoever thought up the name. It’s just perfect. It trips off the tongue like Led Zeppelin, Archie Bell and the Drells and suchlike. It’s full of gusto and irreverence and mischief.

It’s also a bit pub-like, albeit pub-like with a twist, in the vein of The Slaughtered Lamb from An American Werewolf in London, or the Mexican vampire biker gogo bar in From Dusk Till Dawn, whose name I should probably not repeat in a ­family newspaper, despite it possessing the tongue-tripping qualities cited above.

By coincidence, the new branch of TSG occupies what was once a gogo bar, though this one was ­frequented by hard-faced Eastern Europeans and sweaty commodity brokers rather than Mexican vampire bikers. The decor is (appropriately) stripped back, with bare brick, exposed girders and fractured plasterwork, and a few large art prints on the walls.

They have put the kitchen behind a section of the bar, so you can see where the magic happens: a little row of wok-topped terracotta bowls, aglow with charcoal, as at chef Ben Chapman’s smaller Kiln, a restaurant where, were I to experience some sort of tragic domestic setback, and were they to set up some sort of cot for me, I think I could happily live.

TSG is bigger and buzzier. It promises to serve “drinking food”, which you may think is just a pointlessly elaborate synonym for “food”, but which to the cognoscenti will ­immediately evoke the bustling bar-canteens of Bangkok.

I was with my daughter, my sister-in-law and a brace of nieces. Between us we had an impressive list of dietary requirements, which our server diligently noted and observed. She also lost no time in rustling up two glasses of milk later on, when the chilli quotient became too much for the younger diners.

Disappointingly the skewers, whether made with octopus, little mushroom-like chicken hearts or striated stacks of belly pork, were off. So our “drinking food” order was a little circumscribed: an oyster, dressed with chilli and acacia leaf (a herb venerated by the Freemasons – I could tell you why, but I’d have to kill you); a duck laap, minced meat tossed with leaves and spices; and a “Northern Thai Style Brisket Sausage”.

We loved it all, or I did as I was eating most of it – though if pressed, I’d give the Northern Thai Style Sausage they used to serve at Som Saa around the corner the slimmest of edges over this one.

As at Kiln, Chapman’s commitment to UK-sourced ingredients is unswerving. “Everything comes from Cornwall!” said our server, glassy-eyed with pride. The in-laws, who also come from Cornwall, weren’t so easily won over. But our meat and fish was uniformly excellent (even the velvet crabs are caught in the UK, though I have grown to quite like the funky fermented Thai river crabs served elsewhere). They are growing Asian herbs here in polytunnels: these arrive at TSG fresh and pungent, with all the aromatic subtleties of holy basil and “hot mint” undimmed by the indignities of air travel.

We’d ordered two “large plates” of “drunken noodles”, one of them with meat (more brisket), one without, both drenched in a rich soy and oyster sauce and ­scattered with “banana” chillies and fresh peppercorns, still on the stem like little green garlands; and one of what I guess is TSG’s signature dish, a slow-cooked goat shoulder bathed in aromatic “mussaman” curry sauce and strewn with peanuts. The portions were massive, the flavours bold, the presentation artless and studenty.

The other outstanding dish was a big bowl of “d’Tom Yam” broth with mussels and velvet crabs, keen-edged and fragrant, laced with the bright, zesty flavour of bumpy Thai limes (be they Cornish or otherwise) and, of course, lashings of chilli.

An egg in black vinegar, a plateful of greens braised in sweet soy, a bowl of “economy curry” – essentially, a superior high-street red curry sauce without too much in it beyond a few bamboo shoots – and some rice completed our order.

Then the grown-ups necked a ­couple of Mekong whiskies, a drink that’s perfectly palatable so long as you don’t expect it to resemble whisky in any way, and we considered our lunch.

TSG is a pretty good place to eat out, but it’s an absolutely perfect place for a Night Out that involves food in a prominent, but not necessarily central, way. It’s less restauranty and more barlike than the original central London SG, which opened three years ago (and closed in January, not for any particularly sinister reason, but because the lease was up).

Both the space and the menu are ­organised around the idea of groups of five or six, digging in to big, messy plates, knocking back craft beers (in fact they would do well to get in a ­maltier beer from Bavaria or Austria or, oh, I don’t know, Thailand – even my Harbour Pilsner was a shade too hoppy to sit ideally alongside some of the food) and shooting the breeze.

It’s potentially a bit tricky if you don’t all eat the same things, though the staff will do their best to help you; and the touches of delicate, exquisite originality you’ll encounter along the way may get shouted down by the ­gutsier flavours.

But there’s a real ­excitement to it – a sense of élan and creativity and sheer, simple enjoyment – that I can’t remember encountering too ­often elsewhere.