Acme Fire Cult chef Andrew Clarke on a life with flames, staying warm in Dartford, catering for car parks and doom metal

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“I’d been living in a one-bedroom flat up on the fourth floor, so I was desperate to cook outside again”

Yeah, Andrew Clarke looks like he’s into heavy metal and cooking with fire. And he is. And he’s owning it. But he is also something of a budding house music DJ and was a founder of mental-health awareness campaign Pilot Light.

His renowned restaurant Acme Fire Cult in Dalston is the realisation of a spontaneous car park pop-up diner during lockdown, years of honing flame-cooking skills and a childhood that started in Dartford, Kent.

“I’ve just been putting a proposal out for a cookbook, with a bit about my journey with fire and how it has featured in my life,” says Andrew. “As a kid growing up in a house that didn’t have central heating - it had fireplaces - it was understanding the importance of fire to keep warm. Barely 10 years old, using an axe to cut wood and kindling and making sure I had some responsibility in earning my pocket money, but also, you know, keeping the wood basket full up for a winter’s evening. So it’s always been there.”

While his work as a chef and consultant tends to be centered on London, Andrew’s Kent roots are a big part of his story. With family still in the north of the county, and recently showcasing his skills at the Macknade Beer & BBQ Festival in Faversham, Andrew explains his first foray into the kitchen was at The Swan in West Malling. Not that it was planned that way.

“I’ve never wanted to be a chef. In fact, I’ve been quite vocal about being a reluctant chef,” says Andrew. “I got into hospitality to pay for my music. Music was my first love, playing in bands. I briefly put the guitar down and I was DJing also. I’d f*cked up on my exams because I thought I was gonna be a rock star touring the world.

“And so there was a point as a struggling musician that I had to earn some money on the side to pay for my music. I was always good at cooking at home, so I went into a kitchen never really considering a career there. I just happened to be kind of good at it. And after a while you get a bit more responsibility, a promotion. And then you’ve got work, can’t go out and gig and then you’re collecting records because the priorities changed.”

There must have been something in the West Malling water during the early 00s because The Swan housed Simon Maynard, now head butcher at Macknade, and Scott Goss, who is executive chef at Kent’s I’ll Be Mother group and has appeared on BBC’s Great British Menu.

“It was one of those dream teams - you rarely work with people like that,” says Andrew. “There was something magical about that place, you know, being in the right place at the right time. It happens once or twice in a lifetime.

“That was my time with some very, very special people, all really happy to work and push. This is like 20 years ago now. So it says a lot about who we were as people, where we wanted to be in our careers.

“Every now and then the universe aligns, people align and you motivate each other to get the best out of each other.”

FINDING FIRE

Breaking free is something of a recurring theme with Andrew, whether that’s the constraints of a bricks-and-mortar kitchen - Acme Fire Cult cooks outdoors - or challenging the stigma around mental health and addiction in the hospitality sector.

Talking about passions, Andrew has ventured back into the world of music in the past couple of years.

“I think after 26 years of cooking I’ve kind of bought my freedom to be a musician again,” says Andrew. “Before the pandemic I was playing in a band again.

“When I’m in a band, I would play quite doomy heavy metal. But as a DJ I like progressive house. So in the last seven days, I bought myself all the gear again because I’m like ‘F*ck it, I need to play’. We’ve been having some really good DJs at Acme and that was what made me just get inspired again.”

Once again breaking free - this time from the electric kitchen appliances - Andrew’s passion to cook over flames sparked at The Swan and grew with his stints at Salt Yard and Soho House before his own ventures in Brunswick House and St Leonard’s.

“It’s always been that to some extent, but I guess it was waiting for the right moment to go for it,” says Andrew. “But I don’t think I’ve worked in many places that haven’t, at some point, had a bit of live-fire kit.

“At The Swan I pushed to have an outside kitchen done, so the thought was there. But I think I was at Salt Yard when Big Green Egg started getting very popular in kitchens. And that was it. I wanted one, let’s get it in. That was the moment when it opened the doors to people cooking more over fire.

In 2018, Andrew and colleague Daniel Boxer founded St Leonard’s, a restaurant focused on open-hearth cookery.

“It was an idea I’d had in my back pocket for about five years,” says Andrew. “So it was just trying to find the right space for it. And while it was short-lived, with the pandemic coming along, it was a dream to open something that was solely dedicated to fire.”

St Leonard’s may have only been around for a couple of years, but the flames had been fanned and the Acme Fire Cult concept was just a small car park away.

“The pandemic got in the way, but it didn’t stop us,” recalls Andrew. “There was a car park opposite where I lived and I had some barbecues and grills in storage, so we got them out. I’d been living in a one-bedroom flat up on the fourth floor, so I was desperate to cook outside again. We set up loads of tables and just had fun.”

Serving up to 1,200 people over a weekend, it was fair to say that it took off.

“It wasn’t restauranty, it was just more like a party or something and, for me, the penny dropped. We should be doing more of this. And that’s really how Acme was born.”

A well-known face at Meatopia and curating the flavours of Glandstonbury - London’s annual offal festival - it’s easy to see why Andrew is known for being innovative in his cooking of meat. But he is keen to challenge perceptions and experiment, championing vegetables on the grill and creating refined and innovative no-meat dishes, harnessing his knowledge of foraging and wild produce.
“I’m a complete carnivore, but I felt we could do something rather interesting with the vegetables, particularly coming from St Leonard’s, which was very meat-heavy,” says Andrew. “We looked at the location in Hackney, which has a lot of vegans and vegetarians. We led with vegetables and it allowed us to differentiate ourselves from the kind of dude food barbecue that was also happening. That’s where we started figuring out what Acme could be.”
In 2022, Acme Fire Cult opened and Andrew’s passion for cooking on flame and desire to break free of convention met. At least 50% of the menu is plant-based - meats come from select regenerative farms in the UK, while fish is sourced from small day boats on the south coast.

In addition to a covered outside kitchen offering live-fire theatre, Acme has a small ferment lab, which produces the house ancho hot sauce, misos, kimchis and ferments from by-products and excess waste. There’s loud music, of course, and sharing plates and cocktails.

“The important thing is that we don’t treat our kitchen like a live-fire restaurant, we treat it like a conventional kitchen,” says Andrew. “Then you don’t limit yourself to what you can do.”