To recreate anything of substance in Soho is an art as well as a rebellious act. To bypass the well-established cheap theatricality, and conjure a genuine sense of elsewhere, requires more than just the ability to sell a plate of orzo for £32. On Frith Street, barricaded behind a heavy, stubbornly unmarked door, lies KID. It does not bother with the dogma of being strictly Turkish (although it does feel infinitely more Anatolian than OMA feels Greek), and instead it just whispers a slightly broader, sun-baked promise of the Mediterranean.
And so David Carter’s latest iteration, for all its brilliance, begins the second you enter the dining room. Have you ever gone to a place which was supposed to make you feel as if you were in the centre of the world, but it made you feel more peripheral than anywhere else? Perhaps it made you feel like the centre was somewhere around the corner, close enough to sense but always out of reach? KID does that exceptionally well; it evokes a sensation of sitting at the centre of a Turkish megalopolis whilst actively pulling you towards a hazy, coastal periphery. A type of warmth close enough to taste, yet tantalisingly out of reach.
What will propel me back through that unmarked door is the radical integrity of their dedication
The bread, termed Wildfarmed Grilled Pide, was obviously a must. One of us two (not me) had seconds. Made with potato starch, billowing up like a golden cushion and branded with carbon-black griddle marks, it yielded the stretch of a pilates band cranked up to the most punitive setting, before it ultimately dropped its defiance, melting on the tongue.
And then there was the İçli Köfte, which can objectively be described as the restaurant dish of the year. It sat as a golden, imposing orb of bulgur wheat, crowned with crisp vegetables, resting atop a thick puddle of yoghurt and lava-like chilli oil. Bisecting it revealed a dense, steaming payload of wonderfully rich beef mince.
I approached Adana Köfte with profound, historically-ingrained suspicion towards ovine matter, as I feared the childhood spectre of cold, mucilaginous lamb fat congealing in a damp refrigerator. Yet, this dish came free of any lingering barnyard funk. Impossibly succulent, sufficiently smokey, brimming with just the right voltage of spice and textural grace. Beside this parade sat the Çoban Salata. Alas, caught in the grip of advanced sodium intoxication, I treated this perfectly polite bowl of chopped vegetables with the unbothered disdain of a toddler presented with educational wooden toys on Christmas morning.
Wildfarmed Grilled Pide
İçli Köfte
Adana Köfte
Wine lists, even in the most memorable restaurants, sometimes feel vapid and saturated by boldness, by both their presence and their absence, notable only for the extortionate markup. At KID, however, the list is presented as liquid archaeology, tracking endless migration of vines from 8000 BC Anatolia through Hellenic trade routes and Roman expansion. I extracted a bottle of Barraco Fior di Bianco, full of bruised orchard fruit and laser-like textural salinity, tasting so much better than it had to. The aftertaste made an absolute mockery of conventional Soho wine service.
It’s no secret that our restaurant economy is brutally attritional, and its survival too often breeds retreat into artifice. We’ve all seen cynical cost-cutting rebranded as a curated aesthetic: ‘chillable’ red (a thermodynamic con often designed to drop the temperature, raise the alkalinity and numb the palate against rogue, cheap wine), phantom tablecloths (unwilling to shoulder a laundry bill, restaurants lay down miserable butcher’s paper over white tablecloths), and proffering ruinously expensive slivers of expensive fish (monkfish ‘carpaccio’, anyone?) to inflate the bill of a Mediterranean grill.
Fortunately, none of those trends are toyed with at KID. There is nothing performative nor fussy, and you will not second-guess a single plate. What will propel me back through that unmarked door is the radical integrity of their dedication: generous hospitality, fundamental alchemy of impeccably cooked meat with all the smoke, fat and heat rendered to a state of absolute magnificence.
53-55 Frith Street
London
W1D 4SJ
October 2026
