Impala is unlike any restaurant I've ever been to before. Not in its design, which is slick industrial meets sultry 60s: all exposed ducts, concrete pillars, retro woods and parquet floors. Nor the open kitchen, with its vast wood-fired oven and seething charcoal grills. Nope, it's head chef Meedu Saad's menu, as thrilling to read as it is exhilarating to eat. For this is a kitchen where pastilla meets pickled walnut, white beans mix with bottarga, and bird-tongue pasta comes with spiced oxtail. Hold on to your chair. This is one hell of a ride.
Saad, who ran the excellent Thai grill Kiln for eight years, draws not just on summers spent in Egypt as a child (the restaurant is named after the cherry-red 1964 Chevrolet Impala in which he used to ride), but the London Turkish grills where he worked between travels through North Africa and Europe. These memories and experiences are artfully blended here, where his technique is as much classical French as it is North African.
Aish Baladi, that ancient Egyptian bread, arrives first: fresh from the oven, puffed up like a pompous pasha. You drag it through fruity Cretan olive oil and a pile of Tunisian harissa, gently spicy. Then a creamy, pristine white-bean purée, silken and sexy, with a faintly bitter wild herb partner. Two slices of bottarga, Trumpian in their bright orange hue, add a fleeting whiff of the sea.
Pastilla, the pastry crisp and achingly delicate, is filled with slow-cooked cull yaw, bombastically ovine yet never overwhelmingly so, thanks to a well-judged sweetness. Ftira, an Egyptian deep-fried bread, arrives filled with roasted tomatoes, a beautifully fried egg and hint of chilli. Breakfast stodge at its most exalted.
At the other end of the spectrum is a loquat (an apricot-like fruit) and wild cucumber salad: crisp, clean and bracingly refreshing.
There's a smoke-scented squid salad, with slices of green olive, a fistful of cumin and still more harissa, a dish where the balance of texture is equal to its absolute command of acidity. Then a bowl of pasta drenched in the most splendidly lascivious of oxtail ragús, with a hint of cinnamon and tiny nuggets of wobbling fat. This is one dish you will not want to share. At its side, artichokes mixed with a fresh sheep's cheese that is impossibly, ethereally light.
Then, just when I thought we'd reached the crescendo of our lunch, veal sweetbreads arrive glazed with a Bordelaise sauce charred on the grill and served with a pile of ocakbaşı-style salted onion. It's one of the most magnificent pieces of offal I've ever tasted rich and robustly spiced yet elegant; the perfect union of France and North Africa and a dish that captures the restaurant's very essence.
Meedu Saad wowed at Kiln. But at Impala, given free rein and a generous dash of nostalgia, he truly soars.
About £60 a head; Impala, 14 Dean St, London W1D; impalasoho.com