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Hello team.
You may not know it yet but, pretty soon, you are going to be hearing an awful lot about how difficult it is to find the entrance to Kid. Sertaç Dirik and David Carter’s collaborative, Turkish-inspired restaurant – a Soho opening that, barely a week into its life, already has London restaurant enthusiasts in what feels like an unprecedentedly tight chokehold – officially lies on Frith Street, but its lone access threshold sits beyond a largely unmarked, distinctly closed-looking side door on Bateman Street. Because of this, part of the early entertainment in the shadowy, brick-lined and partially glazed dining room comes from looking out as arriving patrons stagger back and forth in a confused loop, squint at their phones, look dumbly at the door, and push at an inaccessible corner window like terrible mimes.
“Just making you get those steps in and work for your lunch,” said Carter, with a laugh, just after he had watched me act out my own stumbling version of this pantomime before finally finding my way inside. The issue is already in the process of being rectified (I heard Carter telling someone to tweak the address details on Google and the website; stickers have been put on those windowpanes to stop people braining themselves on the glass). But, given that restaurant writers can rarely resist a bit of introductory kvetching about struggling to locate somewhere on Google Maps – I’m aware there is some self-referential irony here – then you can expect to read multiple versions of the same struggle with this neo-ocakbaşı's hidden, Berghain-style door and tiny signage.
However, if the stark, onyx-toned brutalism of the restaurant’s design, and its apparent resistance to doing anything as horribly gauche as putting its name above the entrance in a legible size, nudges you towards expecting something self-serious, finicky or aloof, then the early arrivals from the open kitchen set you right. Soft kaymak butter-brushed frisbees of wood-fired pide. Little dishes of luxuriantly silky hummus or urgently funky whipped aubergine and garlic yoghurt, studded with puffed grains. Içli köfte, a bulbous, bulgar wheat flour and beef dumpling, rarely seen outside Turkish homes, bursting with a richly spiced, yoghurt-daubed payload of the known universe’s greatest ragu.
The realisation hits you by degrees. Though Kid’s serious culinary credentials (Dirik’s training at restaurants like Copenhagen’s Amass and bold reimagining of Mangal II alongside his brother, Ferhat; restaurateur Carter’s Michelin star for Oma) primed many for something tricksy, pricey and unabashedly award-baiting, what has actually emerged, both in the launch dishes and the unusually reasonable prices, is something quieter, more soulful and more firmly rooted in the Dirik family’s history and lasting influence on Anglo-Turkish food culture.
“Kid has been in the works for three years and the evolution has been pretty vast,” says Dirik, when we talk, away from the infernal heat of service, a few days later. “The menu swung in all directions – refined and hyper-seasonal Anatolian; super lax ocakbaşı; long lunch meyhane [Turkey’s relaxed, tavern-style restaurants] – and I feel we’ve landed somewhere in the middle. To me it reads familiar, but with slight lifts here and there.” Carter, for his part, agrees. “I think we kind of struggled in the beginning to really find an identity,” he says. “Turkish is done so well in Dalston and Green Lanes that it can be hard to find that sweet spot. Do we go Mangal or do we go Copenhagen? There’s not much in between those two in London, relatively speaking, so that became our identity. That and, you know, just making it banging.”
Perhaps predictably, the repertoire of Dirik’s father, Ali – the grill-whispering pioneer who opened Mangal 1, London’s first ocakbaşı, in 1989 – became a guiding light. The seething, coarse-grained adana koftë and lamb belly and sweetbread skewers aboard a puckering pomegranate and grilled onion salad; the haunch of kid goat, slow-braised to spoonable softness, that gives the restaurant its caprine-coded name. All are in some way informed by the senior Dirik’s mastery of fire, reverence for simplicity and bold entrepreneurial spirit. Elsewhere, austere, stylishly plated creations like the dense, chewy mastic mint ice-cream, brightened by a verdant tarn of mint and parsley oil, show a flash of that New Nordic training.
But what took Sertaç by surprise was the extent to which the culinary influence of his mother, Cemile, came to the fore. “My mum’s cooking is grounding, soothing and comforting,” he says. “The içli köfte, for example, would very casually land on the table at lunches or after school [so] I had no idea how difficult they were to make – you’re essentially making a dough from cracked wheat, kneading it until it’s elastic enough to bind and using it to encase a filing of meat, onions and potatoes. As it’s boiled, not fried, there’s such a fine line between stodgy and elegant. It’s a very humbling dish.”
In embracing and honouring a form of seldom-glimpsed, culturally rich, “grandma cooking” – and this label feels especially pertinent considering Sertaç is also about to become a father for the first time in six weeks – Kid feels like it’s catching a wider culinary wave in London. Impala and Zylia’s stubby, juicy sheftalia; Dara Klein’s family meatball recipe at her second-generation trattoria; the Lebanese stuffed grape leaf dish at Notting Hill’s Kinz that is literally made by Elene, the mother of the restaurant’s two co-founders. Kid’s approachable, affordable and decidedly sexy riff on patriarchal and matriarchal Turkish food traditions cements an era where restaurants are realising that humble isn’t the same as simple. And homestyle ancestral cuisine doesn’t necessarily need to be “elevated” or reimagined to be taken seriously.
In fact, what Kid does is collapse disparate eating experiences – grilled mackerel on the banks of the Bosphorus, slow-roasted goat near Bodrum, içli kofte and borek made by a doting matriarch in Chingford – into a few hours of tactile, messy pleasure in the heart of Soho. “We kept asking ourselves: what would Mangal Ocakbasi [Mangal 1] look like if you launched it in 2026?” says Dirik. He and Carter have attempted to gather the past, present and future of Turkish food in London into one moodily lit, massive blockbuster. You probably won’t want to leave. And, well, if you combine the elusiveness of that door with the sizeable portions and a few peach Margaritas, there’s every chance you won’t be able to.
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