manteca

Pork fat as the brief

Pig head ragù sets the terms early for Chris Leach, chef and co-founder at manteca in Shoreditch, London. The dish is not a flourish around the edge of the menu. It sits close to the restaurant’s centre of gravity, alongside pig head fritti, house-made pasta, salumi and wood-fired cooking that treats the animal as a whole brief rather than a set of prime cuts. Leach’s work here runs through Italy, pork fat, offal, fire and pasta, with a name drawn from Spanish and from a Dizzy Gillespie track. He has said the word worked for the feeling he wanted in the room. That matters because the cooking at manteca does not separate appetite from atmosphere. The bench, the pass and the room are part of the same method, a place where the less obvious cut has to earn its place through texture, depth and use. Leach’s current station is as chef and co-founder, and the kitchen’s discipline is visible in what it chooses not to discard.

The whole animal in the pasta water

The program turns on house-made salumi, fresh pasta, wood-fired breads and whole-animal butchery. Prosciutto, salami and coppa come through the in-house curing room; hand-rolled shapes move through dishes such as strozzapreti, chitarra verde and lumache. The point is not rusticity for its own sake. It is a working system of fat, offal, starch, smoke and acid, adjusted as the menu changes with the season and the kitchen’s daily judgement. Pig skin ragù with parmesan and crisp skin, fazzoletti with duck ragù and duck fat pangrattato, beef battuta with cured heart, and beef fat fudge all carry the same argument. Waste is not solved by declaration. It is solved at the station, by finding a use that tastes inevitable once it reaches the plate. The wine program follows with a curated list and Italian wine on tap, including a house Cynar liqueur made from artichoke waste.

A tight room around the pass

The room keeps close to the work. Poured concrete floors, industrial edges and tight seating make the cooking feel near, sometimes almost bench-side, with the curing room offering its own slow counterpoint to the speed of the pass. It is a lively Shoreditch room, loud with service and full of bodies, but the energy is not decoration. Leach has described restaurants as an emotional experience, made from food, atmosphere and the way the parts sit together. At manteca that idea has a practical shape: salumi hanging in view, pasta leaving the bench, fire taking meat and bread from raw material into service. Chris Leach asks the guest to stay with the method, from pig head ragù to beef fat fudge.