Seminal Barbecue Restaurant Pitt Cue Closes After Eight Years in London

Pitt Cue, the seminal London barbecue restaurant, has closed after eight years in business. The restaurant, now on Devonshire Square in the City but originally on Newburgh Street in Soho and its famous barbecue trailer on the Southbank, was one of the big success stories of the city’s restaurant boom.

Opened in 2011 as a trailer and in 2012 as a restaurant by Tom Adams and Jamie Berger —the former now co-founder of the celebrated Coombeshead Farm — the restaurant’s combination of barbecue cooking and nose-to-tail meat husbandry earned it queues, acclaim, and, eventually, a sizeable site upgrade in 2016. Adams’ commitment to Mangalitza pork and Dexter beef before they were everywhere, allied with a background with Jeremy Lee at Terence Conran’s Blueprint Cafe, set Pitt Cue apart not just for the quality of its meat, but for an assuredness of touch that took it beyond London’s litany of meat-over-fire, loosely American restaurants.

Berger reflected on the double-bind of a small, influential Soho site that goes big — “It was a nice old building ... But like many nice old buildings it was not used to having 1,000 covers a week pushed through it,” — in the run-up to the Devonshire Square opening, but the move to a neighbourhood lacking Soho’s thrum did not pay off.

Writing on Instagram today, the restaurant said:

It is with great sadness we announce the closure of Pitt Cue.We would let to thank our customers, staff and suppliers for their support over the last eight years. We are very proud of our role in bringing bbq to the masses in the UK and promoting the cause of proper ethical animal husbandry.

More soon.