London,

Kitchen W8

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Cuisine: European
Meal for two: £90-£100

11-13 Abingdon Road, W8 6AH

Nearest Tube: High Street Kensington

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Phone: 020 7937 0120

 

 

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Kitchen W8 pitches to the rich

 

Quality street: Kitchen W8 is making the most of its Michelin-starred connections

This site, just off Kensington High Street, adjacent to a whiffy pet shop, has proved a tough one to crack in the past. For years it traded as 11 Abingdon Road, offering reasonably good food at a steepish price, never seeming busy enough — a surprisingly large room opens up towards the back. Earlier this year it briefly transmogrified into “Bistro Eleven”.

Now it’s been taken over by Philip Howard, who has been chef-patron at The Square for 18 years, holding two Michelin stars, and Rebecca Mascarenhas, who created Sonny’s in Barnes in the Eighties and other neighbourhood establishments since. Mark Kempson, who has worked with Howard at the Square for two-and-a-half years, is head chef.

On their website, Howard and Mascarenhas proclaim that they want to create “a home from home”, “a much loved local and one that is used by all and sundry in the neighbourhood on a regular basis”.

Here’s a puzzle. The cooking is full-out French luxurious. The few people I know wealthy enough to live around here seem to like food of the type you really can eat every day without feeling any the worse for it. The really rich don’t really crave really rich food, in my experience. But perhaps my experience is unrepresentative too and Kitchen W8 is well-pitched? We’ll see. Maybe the sundries will rush in.

The room is pleasant and relaxed, albeit with odd stripes on the banquettes and tiresomely retro wallpaper, the seating comfortable, the linen lavish, the service friendly if not yet entirely expert. There’s a long menu, offering nine fancy starters, 11 mains, plus a dual-choice set meal of two courses for £16.50, £19.50 for three, at lunchtime or early evening.

Foie gras mousse with raisin purée, fruitbread and parmesan (£8.75) was a lot of expert cooking for the price, like everything we ate here, but a conceptual disaster. It was so creamy it had little taste of foie gras and no texture, this basic blandness not overcome by the parmesan cream coating, the little layer of fruity purée or the caramelised crunch on top. The crispbreads were good but otherwise it was hard to imagine wanting to finish this dish. Why add more fat to foie gras?

Everything else was way better, though. Ravioli of crab and red mullet with squid, cuttlefish, octopus and lemon (£10.50) was impressive. Two packets of sleek, squid-ink blackened pasta had been stuffed with a tasty mix of the crab and mullet, each remaining distinct in taste, and served swimming in a lot of lemony and garlicky olive oil, scattered with a fine dice of squid and cuttlefish and little nodules of octopus. Perhaps it had one ingredient too many but this was a refined dish, a seafood cocktail assembled with real taste.

Roast Icelandic cod, caramelised trotter, Savoy cabbage and lentils (£15) was a funky surf ’n’ turf variant. The fish was a huge chunk, well cooked, surrounded by lentils flavoured with gelatinous little pieces of the trotter, and finely shredded cabbage, perked up with a mustardy dressing. A satisfying autumnal plateful — as was the special of roast partridge with pearl barley and ceps (£16). The two breasts of the bird were served off the bone, tender and not overcooked, accompanied by soft, puffed up pearl barley, flavoured by smokey lardons, with bits of candied apple in the mix. The fresh cep slices, cross-hatched and cooked en persillade, sat on a creamy pool of shallot-flavoured purée, more or less a bechamel.

Both mains came with a sticky meat-stock gravy, the signature of this kind of cuisine — but it was not, as we cynically assumed, the same one in both dishes. No corners had been cut. What you get is impeccably sophisticated cooking for the price. Warm bitter chocolate pudding with hazelnut praline and vanilla ice cream (£6.50) confirmed the expertise of the kitchen — a chocolate fondant, liquid and crusty at the same time, served with a further chocolatey sauce as well as the ice cream, it couldn’t have been better done.

The wine list opens at £14.95 a bottle, or £5 for the 250ml carafe, and has plenty of bottles around £30. A Château des Gravières 2005, from the Graves appellation of Bordeaux, was £10 for the carafe, and tasted wondrously bloody.

Kitchen W8 is a bargain for this area, if such sophistication is what you crave — and it offers a more soothing time than, say, Kensington Place and other raucous rendezvous. Whether or not this step upmarket can turn this backstreet into
a main drag remains to be seen.

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

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