One of my favourite parts of living in a city like London is that there's never a shortage of new restaurants to try. The trouble is precisely that with so much opening, so much of it starts to blur.
So when something new lands, there are a few things I’m looking for:
Will this spot add something new to London’s dining scene? A way of cooking or a format others will spend the next few years borrowing.
Is an established group taking a chance on a new chef, giving them a platform to make a name for themselves?
Or, is the restaurant taking something already familiar and simply doing it better than anyone else currently is?
KID is the new Turkish restaurant that opened last week in Soho, the fifth from David Carter’s dcco, the group behind SMOKESTAK, Manteca, OMA and Agora.
Turkish food is hardly new to London. But two things about KID had me excited going into it. First, Agora and OMA were two of my favourite openings of 2024. Second, Carter has teamed up with chef Sertaç Dirik, who spent years running his family’s restaurant Mangal II in Dalston. Mangal I and Mangal II were London’s first two ocakbaşı restaurants, Turkish grill houses, and when they opened in ‘89 and ‘94 there was very little like them in the city. KID is Dirik’s first time leading a kitchen of his own in a central location, backed by a group with Michelin pedigree. That alone was enough to get me in the door.
The food itself isn’t reinventing the wheel, it’s Turkish cooking over a mangal grill, which London has seen before. But the menu leans on seasonal British produce and proteins alongside non-British flavours like pomegranate molasses and Turkish sivri peppers.
All of which is to say: I went in wanting KID to be good.
I love a restaurant on its opening weekend. The team is still working out the kinks, but there’s something magnetic about the energy of both staff and diners on that first Saturday seating. You feel it before you even step inside KID, the large glass windows give you a peek into the buzzing, candlelit dining room.
Not a single empty table, and a clear sense that everyone around you is there for the same reason you are. James and I were seated a few tables from chef Angela Hartnett and chef Neil Borthwick, fittingly, James had just watched her Where the Chefs Eat episode on Condé Nast Traveler, and we’d been talking about her when we passed Qua Vadis on the way over.
The atmosphere is a 10/10 for a Saturday date night, but I think it would also be well suited to a girls' night out. Whilst it was opening weekend, and the staff were clearly still familiarising themselves with the details of the menu, I found the service to be warm, diligent, and our servers seemed quite passionate.
The menu is my ideal format with seven sections where you order a few dishes in each section that come out slowly, leaving you space to savour each plate.
We start with Sukuk and Grilled Peach and the Courgette Flower with Tulum Goats Cheese. The starters were good, however I’d say they were the most average part of our meal. It was my first time eating sukuk, a Turkish spicy sausage, and I must admit I’m not a sausage fan. It was the grilled peach that got me, however instead of peaches off the grill it was more of a peach purée. This was my least favourite dish of the evening. The courgette flower was lovely, but I’d say on par with other courgette flowers I’ve eaten and nothing remarkable.
Luckily these two dishes were the only ones I felt apathetic about.
For our Meze we ordered the Smoked Aubergine & Garlic Yogurt and the Muhammara with the Wildfarmed Grilled Pide. The smoked aubergine was delightful, the smokiness of the aubergine balanced by the freshness of the yogurt, and a crispy grain sprinkled on top for texture. The muhammara comes deconstructed, with the roasted red pepper dip, walnuts and feta all served separately but in a single bowl. And the pide, a potato bread pita made over the grill, had just the right amount of smoke and served as the perfect vessel for the two dips.
Next were the small plates. We ordered the Içli Köfte, Aged Beef Yogurt and the Börek, Beyaz Peynir, Courgette. If you take only one menu suggestion away from this whole post let it be this: the köfte with aged beef is an absolute must. A pastry served with the most tender spiced beef and again perfectly balanced by the yogurt sauce. The börek was also delightful, and the courgette sauce it was served with complemented it well.
Next up we ordered the XL Cornish Scallop, Coco Bean Fasülye, a perfect example of British ingredients paired with Turkish tradition. The scallop, cooked perfectly tender, came served sliced on a bed of coco beans with the most warming flavours.
For our main we ordered the Lamb Lokma, Sivri Ezme, which is lamb heavily marinated with olive oil, garlic, lemon, and aromatic spices, cooked over the grill until it becomes perfectly tender and served with a finely chopped tomato and pepper condiment. We also ordered a side salad to complement the richness of the dish.
Finally, for dessert we ordered the baklava, which was served with cherry, and for a nearly faultless meal my biggest piece of feedback would be to serve it with a dollop of ice cream (or the Turkish equivalent dondurma) to complement the warmth of the dessert.
KID isn't inventing anything revolutionary with Turkish food, grilling over a mangal has been in London for nearly 40 years. But watching chef Dirik do it in a central London location, with dcco putting their pedigree behind it to make it happen, makes me quite excited and curious to see how KID is received over these next few months.
Let me know in the comments if you’ve been yet, and how your experience was.
You can reserve a table for KID here.
Table for Two lives at the intersection of food and culture, not simply recommendations, but a considered point of view on why dining matters, and where to find the best of London’s table culture. If this piece resonated, please support my work by subscribing.
Gorgeous pictures by the way!
I visited on opening night also and enjoyed quite a few of the dishes you had! I thoroughly enjoyed and know it will only get better + a well formed menu for me to be able to revisit a few times without having to dish repeat! I also wrote an article on it, my first substack 😬