Turkish cooking in London has long meant the ocakbaşı grill houses of the north-east of the capital, and few chefs have done more to move them on than Sertaç Dirik. He grew up in the kitchen of Mangal II, the Dalston dining room his father opened in 1994, and after cooking with the top names in Copenhagen, he returned home six years ago to reinvent the family business with his brother Ferhat, propelling it into the National Restaurant Awards Top 50. Kid in Soho is his first solo restaurant, and his partner is David Carter, who has spent the past decade turning out great places to eat, from Smokestak and Manteca in Shoreditch to Oma and Agora in Borough Market. Carter knows how to open a hit; recruiting Dirik has given him an extra shot of cool.
Wallpaper* dines at Kid, London
The mood: Soho, set alight
The first realisation for guests is that getting in is a challenge. Walk the length of the Frith Street frontage, and you’ll see diners having the time of their lives inside, but there’s no obvious door. That’s round the side on Bateman Street – look out for the tiny goat stamped in the metal – and the first thing it reveals is Dirik manning the flames of the grill. The second is the certainty that you’ve arrived in one of the most happening rooms in London.
Carter has worked with Box 9 for more than ten years, and here the London-based design practice has joined two units of an 1897 corner building and united them through brick: 73,000 unfired K-Briqs, to be precise, made from construction waste and used to form niches, a latticed screen, a fireplace surround and a curving wall down the stairs. ‘We studied the brick patterns and coursing found across historic London façades and worked closely with the bricklayers to understand their trade,’ says Box 9 co-founder Lou Davies. ‘The fit-out was drawn brick by brick, with every joint aligned, allowing the brick to become more than a structural material and instead a contemporary expression of Turkish symbols.’
Overhead, cork joists from Amorim in Portugal soften the ceiling, while the banquettes are covered in chocolate-brown Arc of Joan textiles, dyed by hand and embroidered with kilim motifs, and the chairs are in moss-green canvas. An oversized mobile by the Turkish artist Selin Nisa Açıkel, cast in bronze from recycled copper, hangs above the stairs that lead to the most important part of the whole operation: an open bakery.
The food: Kid gloves off
Begin with bread from downstairs: the tombik pide arrives puffed and blistered from the wood oven, the Wildfarmed pide scored and charred from the grill. Snacks come by the individual piece, so order a courgette flower in crisp batter, blanketed in grated tulum goat’s cheese and drizzled with atom honey, and chubby slices of the house sucuk sausage with a purée of grilled peach that tastes like sweet ketchup. From the meze, muhammara comes heaped with walnuts and feta-like beyaz peynir, and the hummus is all but buried under a crunchy rubble of fried chickpeas.
Skewers of lamb belly and sweetbreads, glossy and blackened at the edges, are a contrast of succulence and squidge cut through by a bed of grilled onions, but the showstopper is the mixed kebap: Adana köfte, chicken and lamb piled high with scorched peppers and a tangle of pink onions, plus a çoban salata of cucumber and tomato on the side.
To finish, the mountain tea rice pudding with orange blossom is already one of London’s most tempting desserts, like a sophisticated cross between Ambrosia and crème brûlée. And whatever else you drink, have a şeftali margarita, as peachy as a Bellini. And, happily, the door is much easier to find on the way out.
Kid is located at 55 Frith Street, London W1D 4SJ, UK