Remarkable and elegant: Akub’s dining room
(Picture: Adrian Lourie)Not long after we had ordered at Akub, Franco-Palestinian chef Fadi Kattan’s new restaurant in Notting Hill, two members of the front-of-house team came hustling over. “We’re just going to give you some more room,” said one, as they levered a vacant neighbouring table in beside our two-top to form a kind of overflow car park. Though it felt, in the moment, like a bell rung to advertise our gluttony, it would turn out to be the perfect introduction to this remarkable little restaurant.
Not just because the menu here is the sort where you can very easily end up ordering practically all of it. But also because, as a gesture, it gives a sense of the groaning abundance, elbows-out intimacy and enlivening, domestic warmth that will ultimately define a pleasurable few hours here. Akub (which is named after a hardy, edible thistle) is a stylishly executed and enormously meaningful act of cultural preservation that seeks to champion a food culture too often hazily described as merely Middle Eastern. It is also, however, precisely the kind of place where a cobwebbed emergency table may be pulled from the garden to better accommodate more guests or dishes; a whirling, radically joyful kaleidoscope of shareable labneh balls, herb-swirled tahini and flatbreads jolted by bright, hot, specifically Palestinian intensifiers.
That it happens to be situated in W8 amid this area’s much-vaunted gastronomic renaissance is probably actually the least interesting thing about it. But there it sits, regardless, set in what was once Malabar. Now you’ll find a compact, elegant Escher picture of a space, generally characterised by crisp white walls and textured green booths.
It is the indoor courtyard middle level, however — with its wooden beams, potted olive tree and bushels of dried foliage, hung from keys that represent lost Palestinian homes — that is the undoubted place to be.
And that was where my mate Joe and I found ourselves, nursing specially imported Taybeh beers and feeling, despite the thoroughly British drizzle beading the retractable glass overhead, like we were in some sweltering Bethlehemite compound.
The food only deepened the illusion. Za’atar bread landed on our freshly-augmented table like a gorgeously warm, confrontationally fragrant flat cap of dough, ably abetted by fava bean foul (a rich, cumin-laced stew), jumbo red lentil moutabal (a pale, hummus-like dip), and snapping, fermented chilli shatta condiments that induce the sort of addictive, exquisite pain once advertised in Soho phone boxes. Arak cured sea bass offered an elegant counterpoint: glimmering, meaty slivers of fish lent a beguiling sourness and spark by the ancient booze and a stripe of sumac.
That Kattan, who is working alongside head chef Mathilde Papazian, is a highly adaptable talent perhaps shouldn’t be a surprise. Though best known for his menu-less Bethlehem restaurant Fawda (the Arabic word for chaos) he also received classical culinary training in France. These varying gastronomic poles are evident on a menu that skips, merrily, from stuffed baby aubergines to new wave rum baba via a fried dough parcel reinvention of the upended lamb and rice stew mansaf, hampered a little by a laban jameed cheese sauce.
But what most impressed me was the cumulative harmony of the meal. And how the kitchen worked the alternating levers of familiarity and strangeness. It felt like this much-appropriated cuisine had managed to both cannily entice and assert itself on its own terms.
We finished, as you should, with silty Arabic coffees and that baba: a bulbous, featherlight cake, seeping fenugreek and cardamom syrup, and crowned by a resplendent whipped cream and pistachio quiff. Akub may be named after a plant but, for me, it feels a little like those keys symbolically jammed in its walls. It is a symbol of ownership, a portal to a new world, and something to be gripped tight and treasured.
