Good morning and welcome back to ** Vittles Restaurants. **Today’s review is by
Before the review, a note regarding Vittles print magazines. You can now buy a bundle of issue 3, ** The Influencers**, and issue 2,
*What Cue Point and Hon’s say about the current state of American barbecue in London *
After I visited every American-style barbecue restaurant in London in 2024, I was often questioned by readers about the conspicuous absence on my list of two of London’s feted pop-ups. The truth is that neither stood out in the torrent of brisket I endured. At the time, Cue Point was holed up at Orbit Brewery over in Walworth, and seemed a bit bedraggled on my visit. Hon’s BBQ, meanwhile, was somewhat awkwardly perched on top of All My Friends – a record shop/cocktail bar situation in Hackney Wick – and seemed to be struggling to keep up the quality under the pressure of queues and hype.
Since then, both have opened in grander surroundings with more permanent setups, and both have received a solid set of good-to-great reviews from the mainstream press, with Giles Coren even calling Cue Point’s brisket ‘impeccably tender, wonderfully fatty, beautifully smoke-embalmed’ amid a baffling riff on Wegovy. These reviewers seem to have at least learned that meat isn’t meant to be the texture of the barbecue you see on Instagram, where the phrase ‘tendernism’ seems to have collectively set us back years in knowing how to cook food properly. So if they have progressed in their understanding of what is and is not good barbecue, and all seem to agree the new spots are decent, it felt like the time to revisit. Perhaps now that London has spent a summer at roughly the same temperature as Texas, there’s been some cultural osmosis? At the very least, I might get a decent mac and cheese.
The progression of the UK barbecue scene in the last few years has been somewhat bewildering. It still revolves around borrowing limited knowledge of Texan barbecue vocabulary around meat and wood as the foremost concern, with the quality of food and output a distant second. This is because, as discussed in my 2024 beef odyssey, meaningful culinary and cultural exchange between Texas and London is still remarkably limited.
The exchange is starting to happen, though. Rather than restaurateurs in London and the UK simply being inspired by a quick trip (Hangfire), or in some cases just witnessing barbecue on the internet and thinking it looked good (countless others), the much-referenced origin stories of Cue Point and Hon’s (which we’ll skip over here, as they form the intro to every article about them both) try to speak to their US reference points: Cue Point founders Mursal Saiq and Joshua Moroney’s success in the Dallas-based World Food Championships and Hon’s founder Man Hon Luk’s training at Interstellar, one of Austin’s standouts. Both places are notable for their attempts to take Texas barbecue in a ‘new’ direction with fusion cuisine, something that I suppose could be a notable feature of what British Texan barbecue looks like. But it’s difficult to accept that this is particularly novel or unique to a British interpretation of barbecue when, in the space of two weeks in Texas last year, I had Texas barbecue crossed with Egyptian, Ethiopian, Mexican and Laotian cuisines. So what do Hon’s and Cue Point actually have to offer in terms of barbecue progress in London?
