Sound the alarm: This beauty is a grill on fire

I WAS about an hour into my lunch at Mountain-chef Tomos Parry's spanking new, instantly thronged successor to the Michelin-starred . Brat when something that sounded a lot like a fire alarm started to wail out over the hubbub of a bustling service.

- Jimi Famurewa

Mountain

16-18 Beak Street, W1F 9RD. Meal for two plus drinks about £170. Open Tuesday to Saturday from noon-9.30pm (kitchen closed between 2.30pm-5pm) and Sunday from noon-5pm; mountainbeakstreet.com

Hunched chefs exchanged looks of concern, Ben Chapman, co-founder of Mountain's restaurant group Super 8, hurried over to frantically tap at buttons on an alarm console beside the door; floor staff conferred at a clenched whisper, and generally tried to project calm serenity in the face of palpable, mounting panic. And then, after barely a minute, the alarm stopped. Order was restored. Diners, most of whom had not so much as motioned for jackets or halted their conversations, continued with their Menai Straits oysters and their silken spider crab omelettes and their puffed zeppelins of grill-fired bread.

Yes, on the one hand, this felt like an unignorable gift from the column-writing gods; a moment when the smoking-hot status of one of the year's most anticipated openings edged from the figurative to the literal. But I mention it because the inaction of the assembled crowd told its own story about the food and experience here. Which is to say, bluntly, that this is a restaurant where not even the implicit threat of a fiery demise will be enough to drag you away.