Well, I’m still full. That’s the first thing to know. -Probably will be at the time you read this too. It’s 16 hours since I finished dinner at Kid, and I think I might be ready to eat again at dinner tomorrow.
So was it worth it? I’m writing this more quickly after the meal than usual. Why the rush? This is because, for one time only, I wanted to be the FIRST critic to review a HOT NEW OPENING. There was nothing in the papers last week, so I think I’ve done it… although the Times puts Giles Coren online on a Wednesday, and as I have to write on Tuesday, I don’t know yet. It’s an utterly pointless thing to strive for, but you’ve got to show commitment.
The kid (£65) was described as ‘for two’: they should have added ‘football teams’
There’s an old joke that Fay Maschler, the Standard’s former critic, used to review so quickly that she was basically in the building site wearing a hard hat, asking if they had a few dishes to send out. Now, however, the critics have no chance of being first. By the time I got to Kid, on the second Monday of opening, I already knew what most of the dishes looked like from Instagram. The PRs, the influencers, they’d all been in, and they’d already become jaded with Kid jokes. The restaurant is named after the kid goat, its ‘hero dish’, and the PRs have done a lot of ‘new Kid on the block’ headlines. One writer said it was inevitable that the national reviews would include a ‘Here’s looking at you, Kid’ pun. Well, as we were scraping the goat meat off the bone, I thought that I might contribute ‘kiddy fiddling’, but something tells me that won’t catch on.
Kid is a modern Turkish restaurant in Soho. It’s very dark, huge, and clearly has a load of cash behind it. The head chef is Sertac Dirik: he makes me think I should spend more time in the gym. A big Dirik restaurant has been long anticipated. His father Ali opened Mangal 1 and Mangal 2 in Dalston in the early 1990s, the first major Turkish grills in the city. Sertac was going to take them over, but he went to Copenhagen for some kind of Spartan agoge, and came back and modernised Mangal 2 with his brother Ferhat.
I said a few weeks ago that every Turkish restaurant in the country has conspired to be a 7/10. Mangal 2 asked: what if it could be an 8? Sertac left in 2023, and now with Kid, he’s achieved a comfortable 9.
There really wasn’t much to fault, and I was eating with people who are eager to find faults: my opposite number at the New Statesman (sshh, don’t tell her readers) and the Sunday Times’s current TV and former restaurant critic. All of us were immediately won over by the bread (£4) and dips: we went for hummus (£6), smoked aubergine and yoghurt (£6) and taramasalata (£7), the latter being the best, as it always is. Grilled onions with fatty lamb belly and sweetbreads skewers (£13) and the grilled quail (£14) were – guess what – good grill cooking. Before the kid goat, we had a nice ‘Galata mackerel’ (£24), named after the fish sandwiches they make by the Galata Bridge in Istanbul, and they’d even deboned it, which is getting annoyingly rarer.
The kid (£65) was described as ‘for two’: they should have added ‘football teams’ at the end. It was slightly more gamey than a leg of lamb, but no less yielding. They also overheard me saying it was my birthday on Friday when they brought the mains over, and handed me a mint ice cream with a candle in it on the house at the end. So, in a word: go!
Kid, 53-55 Frith Street, London W1D 4SJ; www.kid.london.
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