Dorian, 105-107 Talbot Road, London W11 2AT (020 3089 9556; dorianrestaurant.com). Small plates £19-£65; large plates £37-£145; desserts £8.50-£12; wine from £50
I’m going to tell you a story. This is a story about that which shall not be named. A word that is rarely dissected or discussed in polite society. Yes, occasionally it’s muttered casually – between close friends, in an Islington townhouse. You may even hear it whispered along the hallowed streets of London’s Broadway Market – if you’re lucky. But rarely do we take this beast apart. Not often is the brute hung, cut along its middle, for us to follow the grain of its connective tissues.
I doubt many of us even know the origins of this polemic word. Fewer still of the German-born sociologist, Ruth Glass, who coined the phrase, after moving to London and observing the displacement of working-class residents of its neighbourhoods, by middle-class newcomers. We are, of course, talking about that uninvited guest, the ghost at the feast… gentrificationnn!
Ahhh, good old gentrification. This is a word derived from “gentrify”, as coined by Samuel Laing in the 19th century. He argued that one could attain upper-class status through conduct rather than birth.
I was born in west London in 1984, and raised on Notting Hill’s Powis Terrace by my mother, Andi Oliver, when she was 20 years old. Across the following 40 years of my life, I have lived with 23 flatmates in 15 different flats within west and east London. And because of this, I was lucky enough to bear witness to the foreshadowing of the mass-gentrification pilgrimage that was to come to Notting Hill in 1998, and again to Hackney in 2009.
On a Friday night, not long before the beginning of spring, I sat in a restaurant with my mother on the street that grew us both. Dorian sits on a quiet, unassuming road in Westbourne Park, Notting Hill. Beside it is the Globe – a basement club that has been open since the 1960s and was run by my stepfather throughout the 1990s. As well as being where she met him, it is the first place my mother was paid to cook food.
Dorian, which now resembles a 1930s European bistro, was once Coins Coffee Store, run by a family friend and the first place I was ever employed. For three months in 1996 I washed dishes and made scrambled eggs in the very same kitchen where Max Coen and his exquisite team today present a menu of truly refined decadence. The room is warm, the lights are low and, upon entering, a quasi holy feeling is felt within, telling you that yes, you are in fact exactly where you are meant to be – which as we all know is what makes a great restaurant a truly great restaurant.
Dorian also understands the power of the front-of-house. Nadena – proficient, relaxed, adept – was a total pleasure to accompany us throughout a dinner full of clarity and intention. And, as Mum said, “not fancy for the sake of it”. With its tremendous glass wine fridge, marble counter and metallic lamps resembling smartly dressed gentlemen observing the room’s checkerboard floor – which itself evokes a modern Versailles (or perhaps Westminster Abbey?) – there is a satisfying air of grandiosity in the room.
Our only concern for the evening continued to be the inappropriately loud, relentless thrum of mediocre dance music, a melody befitting neither Mum’s nor my taste, nor the predilections of my predecessor, Jay Rayner. If I can be so bold, I think we all would have preferred some gentle jazz. (I must stress, this is not a Dorian-specific problem, bad music in good restaurants is a consistent institutional failing.)
This was not our first Dorian rodeo – so we began with the rostis, which arrived smart and privileged. Max has a superb way with a potato and crème fraîche and caviar. I’d love to tell you about the other dewy, cheesy, truffly situation that sat to my right, but my mother ate it. This is probably a good time to mention that a few years ago my mother went from seafood enthusiast to a person with a seafood allergy (after a particularly violent episode in Antigua with a lobster). It’s all been very upsetting. She has described it as “being broken up with by the best boyfriend you’ve ever had for no reason”. So when fish can be safely enjoyed, my mother’s euphoria is evident.
Our tuna crudo, sharp and cleansing, harked back to the lauded tuna tartare of Park Lane’s Nobu in the early noughties. Here, too, at Dorian, you feel as if it were sliced from the belly of the beast a mere moment before.
Ever since I can remember, my starting point on a menu is the fish. When we step into a restaurant, we are essentially looking for the sublime and rarely do I not find it. Case in point, the turbot. Oh the turbot… if a truly multisensory experience is required for ultimate happiness, this dish was it – my nirvana. Fat steaks of butter-soft fish and verdant green herbaceous sauce. This dish made me happy, it made me want to write poetry. With this dish, one could feel the passion of Caravaggio in Max’s cooking.
I’m not sure why neither Mum nor I ordered the steak. Many of the current residing members of Notting Hill arrive at this restaurant for just that. This is a côte de boeuf that has attained that which many of the clientele cannot, Instagram fame combined with a word-of-mouth reverence. It’s decadent, it gleams and it shines as it shows up for our neighbours, a table of four – who ordered the beef and a bottle of barolo – showing the room they knew who they were and the night they wanted to have.
Mum and I also know who we are. We’re people who like a gentle broth, one that heals. The wild mushroom liquor, with charred greens and smoked potato, had a welcome fattiness and was inventive and delicious.
It was truly lovely to have dinner with my mother at Dorian, at the end of Powis Terrace, the place we called home for so long. We talked about when things around here changed. Something so intangible to begin with. Unfriendliness is what she noticed first. Something so small, that as we all know, can become something so big. I, like so many others, have feared change in my life and tried to hold on to old things. But what I’ve always known is that fundamentally, we are here to share space together, with grace and patience and love. Mum calls it “breaking bread”. Sharing food with each other is love without words and eating together creates space for conversation. Gentrification is not something that we usually talk about. But sometimes, just sometimes, you can talk about it. Go on, I dare you.
• This article was amended on 13 April 2025 to replace some words that were omitted during the editing process.
