Acme Fire Cult
The Marmite on the sourdough starts as 40FT Brewery's leftover beer yeast, and the ancho chillies that go into Acme's hot sauce go back over the wall into the brewery's schwarzbier.
Why go
Andrew Clarke and Daniel Watkins ran a seven-week pop-up in the London Fields Courtyard in spring 2021, then opened here on 1 April 2022 inside 40FT Brewery's Bootyard, sharing it with The Dusty Knuckle bakery. They took the site with no kitchen in it and cooked on their own smokers off trestle tables (The Staff Canteen). What they built since is a closed loop with the brewery: spent grain ferments the nukazuke pickles and makes the dog biscuits, and the first runnings off a hazy IPA reduce down to a sticky molasses that glazes beetroot before it goes over birch wood to smoke and semi-dry (The Staff Canteen). A small ferment lab handles the misos, the kimchis and the house ancho sauce. Vegetables lead the menu and the venue says at least half of it is plant-based.
Order this / avoid
- Order: the fermented squash hummus, which The Infatuation ranked among the best vegetarian dishes in London. The Marmite butter sourdough, where the Marmite is theirs. The Tamworth pork chop with mojo rojo off the terrace grill. Whatever whole fish is on the specials.
- Avoid: turning up in bad weather, since most of the seating is outside and the decking only closes in the worst of it. Coming for a steakhouse dinner, because the meat here is in support.
What locals & experts say
- Heidi Lauth Beasley for The Infatuation, scoring 8.4:
This is a restaurant where you'll find hefty slabs of tender Tamworth pork alongside a tangy fermented squash hummus that instantly ranks on our list of the best vegetarian dishes in London.
On the hummus itself:the fermentation gives it a proper little kick that balances out the creaminess and the sweetness of the squash.
3 - Andrew Clarke to The Staff Canteen, on what they were opening with:
There's a lot we need to figure out because we literally saw the sight in late December and last week we got the keys,
and on how it was funded,We're not doing it with any budget, we're just selling some t-shirts, selling some small bits of food and just continually reinvesting in it.
2 - No chef vote and no national critic. The London chef votes hold nothing for Acme, and no bylined masthead review was found. The rung rests on one rated-review score and on documented process.
Good to know
- Where: the Bootyard on Abbot Street, Dalston, inside 40FT Brewery and next to The Dusty Knuckle bakery.
- Seating: mostly outdoors. Sixty covers in the yard, forty on semi-covered decking, fifty inside, and the kitchen itself is on the covered terrace.
- Beer: ten taps of 40FT brewed on site, plus a special-edition beer brewed each month to pair with the menu.
- Diet: the venue states at least half the menu is plant-based, with vegetables leading and organic and heirloom varieties named.
- Booking: recommended. Dogs are welcome and get biscuits made from the brewery's spent grain.
- Hygiene: FSA rating 5, inspected 30 January 2025, with food hygiene practice scoring a clean 0.5
Verdict
should-visit — The kitchen and the brewery it sits inside feed each other's waste. Spent yeast from 40FT becomes an Acme Marmite that goes on the sourdough, beer-soaked ancho chillies become the house hot sauce, the first runnings off a hazy IPA reduce to a molasses that glazes beetroot before it is smoked over birch, and the spent grain ferments the nukazuke pickles. Then it runs backwards: Acme's ancho goes into 40FT's schwarzbier as an adjunct. That is a closed loop with a ferment lab in the middle of it, and Andrew Clarke and Daniel Watkins built it with no kitchen, using their own smokers on trestle tables. Vegetables lead and the meat supports, which inverts what live fire usually means. Heidi Lauth Beasley scored it 8.4 and put the fermented squash hummus on The Infatuation's list of the best vegetarian dishes in London. It holds at should-visit rather than higher because that 8.4 is the only scored verdict anyone has filed, no national critic has been there, and no chef has named it in the vote record.