Please note, venues at Pump Shoreditch are no longer licensed to sell alcohol. Eating &Drinking editors, March 2016.
Ever wish you felt like you were in a GCSE drama class comedy skit? Just order a drink at Boneyard, a US-style meat joint at Pump Shoreditch, petrol-station-turned-street-food-market.
‘Sorry sir, you can’t drink that beer in here.’
‘This beer you’ve just sold me?’
‘We can sell it to you but we can’t let you drink it in here. We have the same licence as an off-licence, you see.’
‘But you’re not an off-licence – you’re a restaurant.’
‘I know: stupid as fuck. Would you go to the outside area now, please?’
This idiotic predicament arose because the venue inherited its licence from the petrol station. It’s a real shame. In a city so crammed with meaty dude-food eateries that opening one is less a USP than a plain old P, the pork ribs here are a serious contender for London’s best: huge slabs so fall-apart tender that picking one up is liable to leave you wearing a meat hunk as a bib.
The rest of the menu doesn’t come close. There’s buttermilk-fried chicken: saltier than the sea, slightly dry meat. Tater tots: coagulated brown bullets of grease. and Mojito Slush Puppies (a £9.50 cup of apparently mint-free alcoholic lime frost). If it weren’t for the ribs, this place would deserve scorn, outrage and zero points. Hell, even with the ribs it’s baffling: why not turn the place into a single-dish joint? Or join its Pump Shoreditch neighbours in being a small takeaway shack and use the rest of the space for outdoor seating where you can drink with your food?
This place is in Shoreditch: diners could trip and fall face-first into another eatery that’ll serve them both food and booze. In fact, during our midweek visit diners bunched into the adjacent fairy-light-strewn, cactus-pocked wooden lean-to, while the big timber-lined dining room – which offers the bulk of their seating – sat empty as a politician’s promise. ‘Get boned at Boneyard,’ says a message on their blackboard. Head here and you sure will. Unless you’re teetotal, that is.