London’s best sustainable restaurants: Review of Blacklock Soho

The original Blacklock in Soho sits proudly in a basement that was once a down-and-dirty lap dancing club and brothel. Now, guests are still encouraged to get down and dirty – but with sharing plates of chops that demand to be eaten with your hands.

Blacklock has added Shoreditch and the City to its group of restaurants across the capital, and there are further expansion plans in the pipeline.

Naturally, the restaurants have been slightly more polished as budgets have increased. Each has its own personality, while the classic wooden tables and 1960s-style chairs create a distinct Blacklock vibe that’s a nod to chophouses of a bygone era.

Meat – or more specifically chops and big hunks of lamb, pork and beef, on or off the bone depending on your preference.

The beef dripping chips are an essential side, while the kale and parmesan, or winter salad, are optional greens.

Save room for the white chocolate cheesecake. Or don’t – but order at least one to share, anyway, ceremoniously dolloped in bowl.

Wash it all down with a glass of wine or a great selection of cocktails for a fiver. Make ours a negroni.

This place is as relaxed as restaurants get: sit back, relax and they'll do the rest.

In fact, we didn’t even need to order – the food just magically appeared. There were seven of us and, as everything sounded delicious, we asked our server Matt to choose for us. It was the second best decision we made that day (the first to dine at Blacklock, obviously).

Come here to devour your food and soak up the wine, which is quite literally on tap, and let time flutter by. We were there for lunch and stayed at least four hours before we were eventually – and, admittedly, apologetically – kicked out to make way for another booking. We probably could have stayed for dinner.

Blacklock’s primary goal was always to create a high quality, meat-focussed restaurant that offered good value for money.

“It was never on the table that we would serve poor quality meat cheaply, because that’s just not a compelling offer,” says Kerr.

The meat comes from Philip Warren in Cornwall, who describe themselves as professional butchers who farm. Their strapline is “meat as nature intended” – and healthier meat always has the best taste and texture.

Blacklock manage to keep the prices down by operating nose-to-tail policy for their lamb, which means they buy and serve the whole carcass. They share pork with the likes of the Smoking Goat and beef with other Cornish restaurants who operate on a similar philosophy.

This means they can buy prime cuts for cheaper and pass that saving onto the guests. It also means they have discovered a new appreciation for lesser known cuts, like the “Sixth ribeye”. This misses out, a single digit, from being a prime ribeye because it has slightly less fat than the fifth. But opt for this and you’ll get a 300g lighter flavoured steak for £18 as opposed to £30.

Sustainability is also key for the group bar manager, Sam Dagger. An impressive 90 per cent of the wine is low intervention, grown with zero pesticides. Dagger also operates a “Pip to Peel” philosophy – if a fruit skin is used for garnish the leftover peel and piths will be turned into sugar syrup.

Good for: Large groups of friends

Cost: ££/£££ (They say the average spend is £28pp, but it’s significantly more if you sit there for four hours…)

Sustainability rating: 3/5 (It's a lot of meat, however well sourced)

Overall rating: 5/5

24 Great Windmill Street, Soho, W1D 7LG, theblacklock.com

Lizzie Rivera is the founder of London’s ethical lifestyle website bicbim.co.uk