When a press release comes through selling a restaurant on the strength of its association with “the Mafia’s banker”, expectations of the cooking do not naturally balloon. In 2017, this was the case with 108 Garage on Golborne Road. But whaddya know? It was a critical smash. Punters though, possibly mob-weary, swerved it, and it didn’t last long. What came next didn’t either. “Difficult site,” I said to a friend.
But then, during the Notting Hill Revolution — not a real one, but last year’s cascade of new restaurants — the Counter appeared, from chef Kemal Demirasal. Upscale Turkish, but unusual. Also a bit Greek, Mediterranean, somewhat Levant-leaning. Any food boundaries in that part of the world seem to me blurred, the map perhaps smudged in olive oil. Whatever. Here was a room of romantic gloom where one might eat swampish olives, white-chocolate baba ganoush, lamb liver wrapped into a skewer. God, was it good. Everyone said so. And on that difficult site, too. Tell you where shouldn’t be a difficult site, though: Kingly Street. Bar Crispin is always packed, Ain’t Nothin’ But The Blues has for 31 years filled the street with the drumbeat of pint glasses, and Dishoom, a chain hardly novel at 14, continues to draw nightly queues. Imagine if somewhere new opened with room to scoop up the overspill?
Was it this that inspired Demirasal to open a Soho iteration of his W10 original? God loves a trier. We arrived to the echoes of an empty room, roundly outnumbered by the staff. This will change — it has to. At least those staff were lovely, and the place looks good: bare brick; flowers in urns; pale wood shining softly under expert lighting. Inside, if full, it could hum as a date spot, or be the place for small groups of 30-somethings. There’s a terrace, too; we thought of lunches under the sun with a bottle of Grecian pink, whipped tarama and crackers, octopus or prawns. Hope materialised.
That light at the end of the tunnel was swiftly obscured by a bit of an obstacle — the food. Not the Mediterranean catch-all menu, mind, which could square up to anyone’s illusions of self-restraint: do you have the vine leaf, or pistachio-laced muhammara, or perhaps that white chocolate baba ganoush, or all three? And how hungry are you? Who can choose between the promise of slow-roasted lamb, wet with red pepper oil and spiced with dried chilli, or the simplicity of sea bass cooked over coals? Do Medjool dates ruin an appetite, and can you overdose on za’atar? (Seriously, can you? Has anyone heard from Ottolenghi in a while?)
Actually, I can help. Forget the vine leaves. Here they aren’t the wrappers you’re familiar with, instead little rags playing hide-and-seek among pine nuts and pomegranate molasses and a sand dune of bulgur. Bulgur that suspiciously seemed to make up the lion’s share of a “lamb” tartare, too. If you order tartare expecting raw meat in some form, this place is not for you: what arrived instead was a disc of bulgur, perhaps splashed in lamb juices, and then drowned in those pomegranate molasses again.
Molasses both employed and as effective as an acid attack, chucked across the food with such devastating potency it was hard not to suspect the chef of malicious intent. The bitter ugliness of the flavour stung. A very good glass of Turkish red failed to soothe the wound. What else was there? A cloying, plasticine puck of cheese saganaki — why no crisp crust? — was no comfort, though the dressing of both truffle honey and mango chutney hinted at the original Counter’s smarts.
Molasses were chucked across the food with such devastating potency that it was hard not to suspect the chef of malicious intent
A stinting dish of saffron and crab orzo suffered the tartare’s snag, the crab barely putting in an appearance. It also bored; more oomph was wanted. Had they used all the oomph up on those molasses? Which also, as it happened, wrecked the grilled sivri peppers. Well, until the sumac sprinkled on them did its napalm-in-the-morning thing on our tastebuds.
The price, at £180 for two barely drinking, also burned. I left with only the faintest flicker of hope remaining, but only because of the Notting Hill memories. As it is, sharing the name seems an insult to the first-born.
