Beat Hotel and Ilegal Mezcal took chefs Andrew Clarke, Ed McIlroy and Holly Middleton-Joseph to Oaxaca and Mexico City, then gave each of them a night in London to show for it. Smoke, brains, worm salt and a lot of horchata followed.
Thirteen-odd hours of travel, and the first stop in Oaxaca wasn’t a bed. It was a temazcal, a pitch-dark sweat lodge where the whole crew were beaten with herbs, rubbed down with mud and handed a hot ceremonial tea spiked with mezcal. As jet lag cures go, it beats a flat white.
Among the sweaty and jet-lagged were three London chefs. Andrew Clarke of Acme Fire Cult, Dalston’s live-fire favourite. Ed McIlroy of Tollington’s, the Finsbury Park chippy turned Spanish fish bar. And Holly Middleton-Joseph of Hausu, the Peckham restaurant and listening bar where dinner downstairs has a habit of turning into records upstairs. Over three nights in Oaxaca and three in Mexico City they ate, drank the mezcal at source and took notes. The idea was that each of them would come home and turn it all into a dinner of their own.
The people behind it know how to take a party on the road. Beat Hotel takes its name from the scruffy Paris hotel where Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and the rest of the Beat Generation writers, the counterculture crowd behind books like Howl and Naked Lunch, lived and partied in the late 50s, and first opened as a venue at Glastonbury in 2011, with ‘Eat, Drink, Dance’ on a towering sign out front. It has since decamped to Marrakech and, this summer, to We Out Here, where Acme’s team cooked over live fire beside its stage.
Ilegal has an origin story to match. Founder John Rexer started smuggling small-batch mezcal from Oaxaca to Café No Sé, his bar in Antigua, Guatemala, and launched the brand in 2006. Bacardi became its sole owner in 2023.
Back in London, it all became a four-night residency from 13 to 16 October, with a dinner at each chef’s restaurant and a closing party at Carpet Shop in Peckham. It may have been the same trip and the same mezcal, but three very different menus.
Acme Fire Cult lives in the Abbot Street car park next to 40FT Brewery, and everything on the menu meets a flame. Just don’t call Clarke a barbecue chef. “I use the term live fire,” he says. “If we want to cook classic things like a beef bourguignon, we’ll do that. We’re just doing it over charcoal and wood.”
Clarke opened Acme Taco at 40FT’s Walthamstow brewery in April, and a second opens in Dalston on 1 November. In a city suddenly full of taquerias, he went looking for what would set Acme apart. “Everyone puts pink onions on tacos, it seems,” he says. “There’s a formula people follow to make things feel as authentically Mexican as possible. And yet I didn’t see much of that in Mexico.”
Instead he found street traders “doing one thing and doing it really well”, and a new wave of young Mexican chefs cooking the food they grew up on with a European or Japanese twist. “I guess in doing that, we’ve become more authentic,” he says.
His menu feels like a travel diary. Dinner opened with a ceremonial mezcal tea, a riff on the one they were handed in that sweat lodge, herby and gently sweetened with agave. Friggitelli peppers came blistered off the grill, slicked in bacon fat and finished with worm salt, which turns out to taste earthy and savoury. Bluefin tuna aguachile roja was cold and sharp against sweet plum and fennel, and the XL shrimp was glossy with achiote butter and lime. The main event was a seven-hour lamb shoulder barbacoa, soft enough to pull apart into heirloom corn tortillas, with grilled pineapple, a jalapeño verde and a salsa borracha spiked with Ilegal that carried the mezcal’s smoke right through. It’s a grown-up version of the asador lamb Acme cooked with Beat Hotel at We Out Here. Pudding was a café horchata cremeaux, the rice milk street drink reworked to be silky and cinnamon-warm, cut with plum and crème fraîche.
Then there was the pig’s head tostada, which comes with a story. In Oaxaca the crew queued at a food truck selling pig’s head tacos and asked for the secret habanero sauce. “It was so hot,” Clarke says. “Then it got on other things as well.” He ended up binning half of it. “But it was fucking delicious.” His version is a quince ketchup made with habanada peppers, which carry the habanero’s flavour with none of the heat. “I’m hoping that some of the crew pick up on the fact that it’s the same kind of sauce without the heat.”
Out at the palenque, the distillery where the mezcal is made, Clarke saw fire used in a way he hadn’t before. The agave hearts, called piñas for looking like pineapples, are buried in pits and the ground is “set on fire, essentially”, left to smoulder for days until they caramelise. “The whole palenque is smoky,” he says. “It picks up these wisps of smoke that are naturally in the environment.” For a man whose career runs on fire, he calls it one of the highlights.
Tollington’s is what happens when you keep an old Finsbury Park chippy almost exactly as it was, tiles, formica and fryers included, and fill it with Spanish fish. McIlroy, the Four Legs owner behind The Plimsoll, opened it in 2024. This year McIlroy added Bar Etna in Newington Green with Philadelphia pizza legend Joe Beddia. Ask what ties a pub, a fish bar and a pizza bar together and he doesn’t pretend there’s a grand plan. “There isn’t really a thread; it’s more about whimsy. If something feels right, just do it.”
McIlroy’s Mexico moment came at the market in Oaxaca with chef Rodolfo, who moved through it “as though he could navigate it with his eyes closed”, translating every herb into something the London crew could recognise. Lunch was Rodolfo’s calabacitas, a pumpkin and corn broth McIlroy calls “probably the most nourishing thing I ate on the whole trip”.
His souvenir came from a stall. “One of the market vendors was also selling brain quesadillas, which felt like a natural fit given our love of offal at Tollington’s.” His quesadilla de sesos swaps pork brain for veal and salsa for brown sauce, a very British spin on an Oaxacan street snack. Brains cook down soft and creamy, closer to a savoury custard and are folded into a crisp griddled quesadilla with a tangy hit of brown sauce; it makes more sense than it sounds.
For a Spanish fish bar, the menu kept Spain at arm’s length. “There’s very little Spanish influence on the menu beyond the language,” he admits. The crossover was tongue in adobo, the meat slow-cooked until tender in a brick-red sauce of dried chillies and vinegar that brings both smoke and tang. It came with the much-loved chips that usually go out as patatas bravas, there to mop the whole lot up.
Oaxaca City is inland, which might seem an odd place for a fish chef to go looking for ideas, but McIlroy isn’t bothered. The coast is under three hours away, he points out, and Tollington’s fish comes five hours up from Devon. He’s a fan of Humar, a seafood spot in the city, and has cooked with mezcal for years, folding it into bisques and beurre blancs where it “brings a lovely smokiness to a kitchen that might otherwise be devoid of a grill”. His rule is simple. “Mezcal works best in a sauce, where it can play its part alongside the other ingredients. If you really want to taste the mezcal itself, though, leave it in the glass.”
Hausu lives in the Grade II-listed old ticket office of Peckham Rye station and takes its name from a cult 1970s Japanese horror film. Middleton-Joseph runs it with her brother Tom and Christian Williams, cooking a seasonal menu shaped by her Chinese and Trinidadian heritage. Upstairs there’s a listening bar hung with long red curtains.
Middleton-Joseph didn’t necessarily come home with a lightbulb moment. “My brain doesn’t really work like that,” she says. She writes menus to the seasons, and she wasn’t about to let a trip take over. “I’m never going to go to a country and then try and fully rip off what they do. It always needs to be a reflection of what we do here.”
So Mexico came in through the side door. “It was literally simply putting things on tacos,” she says. Venison is in season, so venison went into a taco, rich and gamey against jammy burnt blackberry and a green kick of jalapeño. This habit was there long before the trip, too. Earlier this year Hausu was serving smoked tomatoes with salsa macha and fried kumquats, and the kumquats turned up again here, sharp and sweet on a crunchy tuna tostada. “Get put in a box and you’re trapped,” she says. “We want to be as free as we can in this kitchen.”
The mezcal went into the oyster, a cold, briny mouthful with house Tabasco and a slick of black oil on top, “to reflect from one smoky note to another”. Scallop crudo was soft and sweet with strawberry and a hit of black peppercorn, and hen of the woods skewers came charred at the edges and glossed in a deep, dark mole. Which raises the question of how anyone does slow sauces through a packed service. “It’s all in the prep,” she says. “Otherwise you would be waiting a day for your mushroom skewer.”
The pig’s ear chicharrones that opened dinner, salty and shatteringly crisp, had everyone around me raving. She also made the frozen horchata, creamy, cinnamon-sweet and boozy enough to pass for pudding, and nearly left the blackberry cola sorbet off the menu altogether. “I wasn’t going to include it, and then I was like, we need something a bit lighter.” Next to a rich, gently smoky ancho chilli chocolate mousse, it was the right call. Sharp, fruity and cold after a night of chilli and smoke, it was my favourite pudding of the night.
