Restaurant review, Beard to Tail, London.

Shoreditch was the original home of London's theatreland and, in mid-Victorian times, it positively vibrated with 'penny gaffs' – pop-up, makeshift theatres staged in converted warehouses for audiences of rowdy young people. Sound familiar? You can find the same phenomenon in EC2 today, except the pop-ups are now bars and restaurants. Wherever you look, once-alarming or darkly unpromising side-street gaffs have been re-made as trendy eating houses.

Two of the new impresarios are Richard Wynne and Kate Crutchley, who own Callooh Callay in Rivington Street. The name comes from 'Jabberwocky' and patrons experience wacky scenes: drinks are served in gramophones and you walk through a wardrobe to find a second cocktail bar. (A wardrobe? Are they confusing Lewis Carroll with CS Lewis?)

Wynne and Crutchley are the people behind Beard to Tail, but it's short on japes – except for its name, which seems to be a bilingual joke since it translates, in French, as 'barbe-a-cue'. But 'barbecue' isn't a French word, it's Haitian as everyone knows (at least everyone who's just looked it up in their Chambers dictionary). So that's hilarious. It may also remind you of 'nose-to-tail eating' as invented by Fergus Henderson at St John, but Beard to Tail is even more butch. Their menu is festooned with pictures of carving knives and forks, cleavers, serrated-edge breadknives, and main-course options are signalled as 'INTO THE PIG' OR 'ONTO THE COW'.

Décor-wise, it's serious industrial chic: there's a shed-like feel about the planked and breeze-blocked walls, more than a hint of the factory about the enormous aluminium ventilation shafts running overhead. And a weird noise of grinding machinery behind the music. Remind you of David Lynch's film Eraserhead? The industrial soundtrack, the spooky darkness, the faint undercurrent of alarm? That's Beard to Tail. But it may be a generational thing. Apart from us, there wasn't anyone there under 35. It was packed with trendy, moneyed young Londoners, apparently fresh from a Rankin shoot, fizzing with energy and chat.

I noticed that they didn't bother much with wine. When I fussed over the short wine list the manager said, "We are a cocktail-based restaurant, sir," with Jeeves-like hauteur. So I had a Five O'Clock Shadow, a dark and sexy concoction of rum with Punt e Mes and a touch of pimento, and felt amazingly sloshed.

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