Classics Revisited: Kitchen W8 brings hearty home cooking to Kensington
Kensington and Chelsea is shedding full-time residents like London’s answer to Venice. The population of the Royal Borough shrank by 2.2 per cent in the last census – the only area in southern England to register a loss.
I hear things are so calamitous that Pizza Express is developing a truffle-topped Sloppy Chelseppe, with 25p from every pizza sold donated to the Kensington in Peril fund.
Those locals still clinging on are laying the blame for the exodus at the barred-and-bolted doors of buy-to-let investors. Take an after-dark stroll through the garden squares between Cromwell Road and Ken High Street and there are so many blacked-out windows you could be forgiven for thinking there’d been a power cut.
But I wonder if the real reason that Kensington’s population is nosediving is because locals have finally had enough of its historically awful restaurant scene. One of the richest places in the country has always had a poverty of good places to eat. Notable exceptions include the serene Min Jiang, aristocratic Launceston Place – and Kitchen W8, which has just re-opened after a refurbishment.
Kitchen W8 is owned by chef Phil Howard and restaurateur Rebecca Mascarenhas, who are also the brains behind upscale neighbourhood favourites Elystan Street in Chelsea and Sonny’s Kitchen in Barnes. They say on the restaurant’s website that "when we launched Kitchen W8 in 2009, we intended it to be a home from home".
This neighbourhood being Kensington, it looks homely in a way that you probably wouldn’t want in your own home, unless in a state room that you only used occasionally. The chairs are hewn from the sort of pale wood you’d be terrified of getting a stain on while the silvery white walls match the hair colour of many of the customers, whose iPhone torches spark up like fireflies every time a menu is offered.
But there are plenty of things that would be at home in any neighbourhood. There’s a ￡28 three-course lunch and a ￡29.50 early-evening menu (the closest you’ll get in W8 to an early-bird deal for OAPs). If you’re in the mood to celebrate, there’s a ￡120 six-course tasting menu with paired wines, and no corkage fee on Sundays.
Chef Mark Kempson has been here since Kitchen W8 opened, as has his signature starter of grilled Cornish mackerel with smoked eel, sweet mustard and leek. In some ways it’s a classic combination – the eel chimes with the horseradish heat of the mustard, while its smoke is offset by the sweet onion character of the leek – although it’s all upstaged by a star turn from the mackerel, its crisply grilled skin cracking open to reveal fresh, creamy flesh.
Hand-rolled garganelli pasta with yellow chanterelles and baked squash is a seasonal delight, the rough-around-the-edges pasta looking like ragged autumn leaves.
Haunch of venison has thinly cut, port-red meat cooked so rare it looks like duck, shading into a slice of roast beetroot. But it is outshone by an incredibly flavoured base of bulgur wheat, liver and bacon in which the meats are only detectable by their taste, not texture – typical of an approach in which everything on the plate is there to echo and amplify, each ingredient chosen to complement rather than contrast. If Kempson put the grilled mackerel on top of the bulgur wheat, it would easily be my dish of the year.
There’s a nicely assembled, sensibly priced cheeseboard (3/5 pieces for ￡10.95/￡15.95), and a fabulous crème caramel with steeped raisins that taste like shrivelled grapes destined for a bottle of Sauternes.
Phil Howard has form with choosing pedestrian names that belie the culinary accomplishment on offer: before Kitchen W8 and Elystan Street (both Michelin-starred), there was the two-star The Square. But this really is what it says: a kitchen for W8 locals, soothing, sophisticated and satisfying. And reason enough to move to Kensington.
Who to take: Someone who owns a house in Kensington and actually lives there.
What to order: The three-course Sunday lunch has five choices per course, for ￡39.
Kitchen W8, 11-13 Abingdon Road, London, W8 6AH; ?kitchenw8.com
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