Kid, London W1: ‘Fat, richness, sharpness, all in perfect balance’ – restaurant review

Earlier this month, a kind-of Turkish ocakbaşı opened on a corner in London’s Soho. The brains behind Kid are chef Sertaç Dirik and restaurateur David Carter, and I say “kind-of” because, yes, while it has a Turkish-influenced menu – sucuk with grilled peach, pide, börek, hummus, içli köfte with aged beef – and the whiff of live fire, nothing either of them does is ever remotely straightforward, hence the buzz around their new place.

Carter founded Smokestak a decade ago in Shoreditch, a wild, Americana-tinged barbecue joint where, somehow, he made brisket in buns and peach cobbler old fashioneds London’s hottest ticket. Five years later, he opened Manteca, also in Shoreditch, a reimagining of the Italian trattoria for the 2020s, followed by Oma, his Greek-influenced Michelin-starred venture in Borough, and its little sister Agora, and all of them remain dependable places where you get serious bang for your buck. All of those influences – American smoke, Italian flair and Greek boldness – are present and correct at Kid. Dirik’s story, meanwhile, has about it elements of TV’s The Bear: a Copenhagen-trained chef cajoled home to bolster the family business and going on to create the hugely loved Mangal 2 in Dalston. What Dirik and Carter have in common, aside from reputation, is a love of setting fire to stuff, in a culinary sense rather than in a Prodigy’s Twisted Firestarter sense. Kid’s Galata mackerel is testament to this: it’s almost completely blackened and has an incredible hit of smoke in its flesh.

Kid’s website says it’s on Frith Street, but the entrance is actually on Bateman Street, thanks to an aggressively discreet front door that will have you wandering around the glass-fronted corner like some confused visitor at Sea Life, pressing their nose against the tank looking for jellyfish and turtles. Here, however, there are diners beyond that glass, and you may cry when you see them inside sipping their gemlik martinis (black olive, black pepper, white vermouth, frozen gin). Warning: do not accidentally wander into Regulation, a boutique emporium of a very different persuasion just 10 metres away and where a very different type of lubrication is on offer. And of stuffing, for that matter. I shall leave the parallels there.

Kid, as its name suggests, favours the use of kid goat, which will either delight or unsettle the British diner, because as a nation we still quibble about goat meat but for some reason raise no such objection to lamb. They have much in common taste-wise, and Kid’s signature dish – a £65 kid with fig leaf and freekeh for two – comes in an earthenware pot looking very much like a plump lamb shank just waiting for all that flesh to be pulled through the cooked grains beneath. The dish arrived heavy and somewhat intimidating, and left picked completely clean, as did the pickles alongside: fat, richness, sharpness, all in perfect balance.

The room is a rhapsody of browns, with an industrial feel and wilfully uncosy, a design movement that I’m calling “sumptuous sackcloth and ashes”, and there’s a long counter that focuses on a central grill. We visited on day four, and the place was already packed with Smokestak cultists, Mangal 2 zealots and assorted food writers, all of them gazing at the fire and tearing at blistered, kaymak-slicked grilled pide, as well as seeded ramazan pide as fluffy as a Turkish morning after too many rakis.

We began with courgette flowers, which at £7 each will make some people reach for the smelling salts. But these are not those flaccid petals draped over unseasoned ricotta with which Brits habitually offend the French. Here, the batter is intensely crisp, the goat’s cheese insides rich, with atom honey to cut through: it’s a crunchy, sticky, oozing delight. A round of bluefin tuna ezme, a fine, fresh tartare in the Turkish style, comes on what can only be described as a poppadom-like cracker – fried, decadent and completely naughty.

The mackerel, however, is when you understand the point of all this live-fire hoopla. A huge butterflied fish with blackened skin comes crisp from the grill, its flesh all soft and meaty, and stuffed with a carrot-based slaw cooked in what tastes like rich, deep shellfish liquor. It’s the undoubted star of this show.

We end with mountain tea rice pudding infused with sideritis, a wild Anatolian herb that’s warm and vaguely honeyed, and finished with a crunchy, brulee top; it’s also one of the finest desserts I’ve eaten all year. Don’t skimp on the mint oil-topped mastic ice-cream, either: it tastes exactly like toothpaste, and I mean that as a compliment.

A very long lunch closed with shots of Turkish coffee that even Carter admitted tastes “slightly muddy”. That coffee sent me blinking into the daylight and I was still wired six hours later. Much as Kid did itself: distinctive, delicious and thoroughly making its mark.

• Kid 53-55 Frith Street, London W1 (no phone). Open Mon-Sat, lunch noon-3pm, dinner 5.30-10pm. From about £45 a head à la carte, plus drinks and service