Jimi Famurewa reviews Moio: Warmly run endeavour doing fascinating, freewheeling things

Dynamite: Moio blends Scandinavian and Portuguese flavours
Jose Sarmento Matos
Jimi Famurewa @jimfam14 February 2019

Ambience 3/5

Food 3/5

To my south-east London eyes it seemed that the one incontrovertible thing you could say about Moio — a box-fresh, modern European place on Stoke Newington High Street, standing across from the eastern edge of Church Street — was that it was in a plum location.

A high-footfall berth in a food-literate part of town. The geographic equivalent of an open goal.

Well, fun fact: I could hardly have been more wrong.

‘It’s basically the site of death,’ explained my friend Michael, a near Stokey lifer, as we walked there for dinner. He then ran me through the drummer-in-Spinal-Tap succession of doomed past occupants (a Palestinian café named Tatreez, a Spanish-influenced place called, oof, Rustic Twist) each felled allegedly by a jinxed spot and high rent.

And so, writing this review feels a little like swimming against a tide of inevitability. Can any independent place, particularly an unusual one that opened in the frigid wastes of January, lift what looks to be a particularly stubborn hex? Will anything I say change that?

I truly hope so, because Moio is a warmly run endeavour doing fascinating, freewheeling things with texture and temperature, sweetness and salt. Not everything we tried in the quiet 35-cover room (still fitted with Rustic Twist’s open kitchen, long counter and copper accents) worked perfectly.

Jinxed? Box-fresh Moio at its Stoke Newington High Street location
Jose Sarmento Matos

But there’s something about the way co-founders Carolina W Seibel (sommelier) and João Ferreira Pinto (chef) have stuck so madly to their guns that makes their victories all the more thrilling.

To the food, then. A moio is an arcane Portuguese measuring unit, used, among other things, during 18th-century salt trading with Scandinavia. This emblem of unexpected cultural exchange informs a highly seasonal, very short sharing menu, jointly inspired by the dining traditions of Seibel and Pinto’s homelands: Sweden and Portugal, respectively.

A snack of ticklingly peppery Portuguese morcella sausage, served with the fruity jab of a smoked plum sauce and thickly seeded slices of bread, offered a strong if meagre start. Prettily layered foie gras terrine alongside tangy blobs of Roscoff onion sauce and tart pieces of pickled rhubarb, brought a careful balance of whacking great flavours and a paté with that mystical, whipped lightness.

Celeriac vichyssoise with frozen grapes, written down and grouped with other puddingy collisions such as hake and vanilla purée, sounded interesting and slightly El Bulli but also reminded me of that Friends episode with Rachel’s beef-laced English trifle. But when I tasted it? Oh, wow. Finished at the table with a dribble of vivid leek oil it was a warming, deeply creamy hug of a thing, with the joltingly cold detonation of those grapes providing a complementary hit of fresh sweetness.

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Meat dishes — mulchy pork knuckle fricassee with strange coriander dusted crisps; a breeze block of ‘pastrami slab’ with various cymbal-crashing bits of smoked garlic puree, jarringly bitter slices of black radish and a nagging unfinished air — brought us sharply back down to earth.

And then, as we sipped the last of a pretty good bottle of Dolcetto wistfully remembering the meal’s early highs, the third-act of a knockout pudding arrived. Billed as Queijinho de Azeitão it involved a trembling, forcefully lemony block of custard tart on a salted almond cheesecake base, served with a cascade of frozen forest berries.

A dynamite, salty-sweet accord between Iberia and Scandinavia, it was a reminder of Pinto’s crackpot ability, and it sent us back out into the downpour rooting for everyone at Moio. This is cooking that with a few tweaks, I think, deserves time to develop and evolve. Someone apart from N16’s sign designers ought to prosper at this address.

Moio

1 Bread, £3.50

1 Morcella, £3

1 Foie gras, £13

1 Vichyssoise, £8

1 Pork knuckle fricassee, £8

1 Pastrami, £16

1 Queijinho, £6

1 Bottle Dolcetto Fernando Rosso, £41

1 Filtered water donation, £2

Total: £100.50

Moio, 188 Stoke Newington High Street, N16 7JD, moiorestaurant.com

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