The 99 Best Restaurants in London, Part 4: No 10–2
The end is nigh. By Jonathan Nunn.
This is the fourth instalment of the Vittles 99, Jonathan Nunn’s pick of the best restaurants in London. Numbers 99–76 was published here, with 75–41 announced here, 40–11 here and finally No. 1. To read the whole list, you can subscribe to Vittles for £7/month or £59/year, which gives you access to the entire back catalogue.
10. Ikoyi
When Jeremy Chan and Iré Hassan-Odukale opened Ikoyi in St James in 2017, they managed to kid themselves – or kid their PR – that they were opening a West African restaurant. Now that it’s on the Strand and no longer serving pink-glitter plantains, it has given up the pretence of being tied to any one region of Earth. Instead, it showcases Chan’s Martian cuisine – galactic black plectrums of dried citrus, squid chewed up and repurposed as marshmallow – equal parts menacing and beautiful.
The best of Chan’s food, particularly the self-contained smaller dishes that come earlier in the menu, has the quality of great perfumery – in that he is able, through the accretion of tiny, molecular details, to create new contours of flavour. Where Ikoyi differs from its competition is its almost-reckless use of titanic ingredients (long pepper, aged meat, saffron, chilli), balanced across multiple axes in an attempt to create something daintier than the sum of its many parts. Of course, the £350 question is whether Ikoyi is worth this kind of money. What meal can be? But if you have the cash and you want to try the pinnacle of this kind of virtuosic cooking, then you won’t find a better version in London.
180 Strand, WC2R 1EA
9. Kaieteur Kitchen Original
One measure of greatness is the highest level someone is capable of achieving. Another, which the goalkeeper Peter Schmeichel once used to discuss the greatness of Paul Scholes, is when a person’s ‘bottom level’, their worst performance, is so high that it barely registers. Using this metric, Faye Gomes, who is incapable of cooking a dish that isn’t at least an 8/10, is one of the greatest chefs in the city. When her Guyanese food business Kaieteur Kitchen moved from being a one-woman takeaway to a restaurant, you might have feared a slip of quality control, but instead the food is somehow even better. It’s the cooking of someone who is not looking to impress, or to impose their will, but to feed – with all the holistic qualities that entails. Most people don’t bother ordering and just leave it to Gomes to choose what’s good: fried fish, spiced pumpkin, spinach rice, roti – things you’d be happy eating everyday for the rest of your life. The pepper pot on Friday, however, is a once–a-year treat: meat and cow’s foot cooked down with orange peel and thyme for two days until it’s the colour of vinyl, with a phenomenal bittersweetness that comes from cassareep, a thick treacle made from cassava root.
If you told me you’d had a bad meal at any of the other restaurants on this list – even great ones higher up – I would commiserate and accept that they’d had an off day. If you told me you had a bad meal at Kaieteur Kitchen, I would simply shake your hand and tell you that I can’t help you.
Note: Kaieteur Kitchen is currently closed due to a dispute with its landlord, but you can find Faye cooking at Walworth Living Room on Fridays, including tonight. It remains on this list in the knowledge that form is temporary but class is permanent.
8. St. John Bread and Wine
If the original St. John was London’s Dogme 95, as much a manifesto as it was a restaurant, then Bread and Wine was Fergus Henderson and Trevor Gulliver finally breaking their vow of chastity. At Bread and Wine, the menu is a more living, breathing thing than at the Smithfield mothership, freer to move with the times and with the sensibilities of its head chefs, who have included Lyles’s James Lowe and FKABAM’s Lee Tiernan. For the best part of a decade, Bread and Wine has been anchored by head chef (and the author of Parsi) Farokh Talati, who combines the spartan philosophy set down by Henderson with a freewheeling eclecticism, seeing how far the ethos stretches before breaking point (I have even seen one special with bulgur in it).
No other London restaurant contains so many different perfect routes through a menu. If solo, go for the cod roe and egg – which comes, unannounced, with the same layered confit potatoes that Quality Chop House later made viral – and perhaps some cuts of roast mutton, or a faggot in gravy; if in a pair, get a whole pie to share, beef dripping chips and a bowl of steamed greens; if there are more of you, order every pudding on the menu and a dozen madeleines. 15 years after the fact I still recall, with crystalline recollection, my first meal here as a young student who knew nothing: a breakfast of thick-cut bacon on homemade toasted bread, iced orange juice and black coffee – the hypervivid taste of real bacon, real bread, real orange juice, as if waking up from a simulation.
94–96 Commercial Street, E1 6LZ