Wine List of The Week: Boxcar Fire & Wine
Douglas Blyde finds deft cocktails, impeccably clean wines and an array of riffs on Mediterranean classic dishes at the newly minted Boxcar Fire & Wine in the heart of London.
Boxcar Bar & Grill has been reborn – not phoenix-like, but with the deliberate precision of something re-engineered – into Boxcar Fire & Wine: a two-storey homage to flame and fermentation. It’s a place where meat meets ember and bottles are chosen for character, not compliance. Co-founder, Ankur Wishart – the mind behind Boxcar Baker & Deli, The Italian Greyhound and The Lighterman – has turned this discreet Georgian townhouse into something warmer and more wilful. “We’re pouring wines with real personality,” he told The Upcoming. Luxury Life declared the grilled croissant tiramisu a “must”. A TripAdvisor pilgrim named Simon A declared it “an absolute find” – though being two minutes from Marble Arch, it’s also perilously close to losing its soul to convenience. The building, Grade II-listed and dating to the 1780s, has been butcher and boutique and deserves to be more than a local secret. Now recast in a copper glow, the space moves through beams and brick, a patio-like atrium, and pavement lights that scatter faint hieroglyphs into the private room below – one of them cracked, disconcertingly, like a promise held too long.
Drinks
General manager, Sergio Soares, last of La Palombe on Kensington High Street, presides over a wine list which is confident without being cocky – often sourced from Bancroft and compiled by someone who appears to actually drink, as opposed to merely swirl and tag. It’s gently iconoclastic, like a barrister with a nose ring. Begin with a martini-like glass of Pierre Moncuit Blanc de Blancs Grand Cru Champagne (£15/125ml) which carries itself with the crisp hauteur of a Parisian maître d’ confronted with ketchup. Or be seduced by Australia’s Unico Zelo Being Sea Foam 2023 (£65/bottle), a pét-nat of Fiano and Vermentino which smells magnificently of lime leaf and low tide.
Still wines commence at £6.50 for a pert Vinho Verde from Quinta da Lixa, a Portuguese pour from Soares’ own motherland, and climb via the Flint Vineyard Bacchus Fumé (£11.50), a Norfolk-meets-Essex amalgam made from grapes grown with the kind of self-belief which wins Bake Off. At the top end (£14), there’s Gut Oggau’s Theodora 2022, an Austrian orange with a fictional face on the label eyeing your flaws before you sip. Alternatively, Diego Morra’s Langhe Nebbiolo plays the part of a Barolo in short trousers – not yet fully grown, but already expressive and shaped by place.
If you’re bottle-bound, indulgence peaks at Château Bellegrave Pomerol 2011 (£137), while
other temptations may include organically inclined, though not certified, white Burgundy from
Bernard Millot (£98), and Boxcar’s own-label “Tinted Glasses” rosé from Provence Cru Classé, Château Saint-Maur, in organic conversion, which is peach-skin hued and classy for £42. Cocktails strike a playful note: the Little Pickle blends vodka, house brine, and a speared cornichon to evoke – in the words of our guest, James Chase – the sly pleasure of a “Big Mac”. For the temperate, or temporarily repenting, Pretty Little Lies mixes 0% gin with grapefruit and eucalyptus – like a melted Popsicle licked by a perfumier. To finish: a cold kiss of Strega Limoncello, or a larger, knowingly named Pickle-Back – if you want to pretend it’s still Friday.
Dishes
Formerly of L’Autre Pied, Pied à Terre, CORD by Le Cordon Bleu, and The Greyhound, the kitchen is helmed by Zisis Gkalmpenis, a Greek-born chef whose name evokes a minor character in The Odyssey. He brings a Mediterranean palate free of flounce or flattery – seasonal, structured, and steeped in remembered flavour: “the food reflects the traditions I grew up with.” Lunch opened with a gougère shaped like a macaron, filled with Stilton and green apple; a lamb belly skewer barbed with pickled onion; and best of all, tomato-daubed toast topped with boquerones, saline and direct. Alongside, a glass of Pinot Blanc from biodynamic pioneer, Josmeyer – Mise du Printemps Pinot Blanc – feline-labelled and part of their Artist Series – which purred with the multifarious dishes.
Then came stracciatella, slicked across flatbread made from “Maria”, their house mother-starter. A pour of Pierre Girault’s eight generation Sancerre, Le Chêne du Roy – taut, green, mineral – met it with the assurance of a wine which understood how to deal with the bread’s artichoke component, being one of the true hazards of the plate. Tiger prawns arrived next, grilled, lacquered in a month-aged chilli glaze, nudged with vinegar, and laid over seaweed like Poseidon’s answer to pici. Then, raw bream, marinated in ponzu and kaffir lime, tasting – inexplicably and wonderfully – of Battenberg cake with a Japanese passport. One misstep and it would have toppled; instead, it sang. The palate reset came afterwards, in the form of Pierre Moncuit Grand Cru – chalky and “cleansing”, as Soares intended.
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The main act was presa of Ibérico pork – a shoulder cut from acorn-fed pigs which spent their lives trotting through oak forests, the fat marbled like good beef, grilled until just melting. Beside it, agria potatoes: golden, greaseless, chive-salted, and triumphant. “Cute,” said Soares. Good enough to make you forget chips were ever a thing, and, most importantly, approved of by Chase, who knows his spuds. The wine was from Domaine Antonin Guyon – Hautes Côtes de Nuits, Les Dames de Vergy, a Pinot Noir from clay-limestone soils near Nuits-Saint-Georges, raised organically by two brothers who know when to act and when to abstain. Sour cherry, wet stone, a flicker of spice. Served cool enough to suggest someone cared.
Pudding could be the burrata with peach and basil with an innocent-seeming glass of Moscato d’Asti – a dish for the well-behaved. But we did not behave. First came the Pink Lady, a memorable layered terrine with unstoppable vanilla cream, with a glass of Akashi-Tai umeshu pepped with plum, round and perfumed. Then the grilled croissant tiramisu – wryly sweet, freckled with raw cocoa nibs, and served with a golden pour of late harvested, botrytised, organic, Domaine de l’Ancienne Cure Monbazillac: indulgent a combination, without ever losing its footing.
Then, cracked from a small, unlabelled vial, something extraordinary, and hitherto presumed
lost – a distilled, pomaceous seeming expression of Herefordshire, ten years in the making, the handiwork of our guest, James Chase. Of that, more another time.
Last Sip
The phrase “low intervention” may ring with the promise – or threat – perhaps funk, cloudiness, and sulphur-less surprises. But every wine Soares poured today was impeccably clean, classically French, and assured. His taste clearly runs that way – and with plans to broaden the Bordeaux offering later this year, he edges into something almost daring, at a time when so many new lists treat the world’s largest fine wine region as if it were simply out of fashion. Still, as the list expands, it may be worth addressing the copper-topped tables, which, charming looking though they are, give off their own bouquet. And not always a welcome one.
Best for:
- French wine, and deft cocktails
- £65 tasting menu
- The Tap private dining room for 16
Value: 93, Size: 84, Range: 89.5, Originality: 90.5, Experience: 93; Total: 90
Boxcar Fire & Wine – 23 New Quebec Street, London, W1H 7SD; 020; 020 3006 7000; info@boxcar.co.uk; boxcar.co.uk
