Kid restaurant review: Go get this goat before it’s the talk of the town

I suppose we should get ahead of this because you’re all going to hear about it eventually: yes, I did try and get into Kid via the window instead of the door. Critics are supposed to highlight the problems restaurants have that they are unable to perceive themselves, and Kid’s main issues are their window looks like a door and their door looks like a wall. And what that means is I spent a long time looking baffled at two corner windows that form outwards into a door-looking glass box, before — he’s not going to do it? — and then — he’s not going to do it, is he? — finally getting brave enough to push two fingers against them, looking for some give or sign of a hinge. There was none.

At some point, you have to zoom out and look down upon yourself. You have to articulate the thought: you are a man pressing his hand uselessly against the coolest new restaurant in London. You have to ask questions about your life, and where it might go from here.

Eventually I got inside (a friend helped). The building is lined with grey bricks and built around a spectacular double-sided charcoal grill and has heavy black curtains and moody low lighting and everyone here is good-looking, which is all to say it’s very cool here. Of course it is: Kid is the first restaurant from Sertaç Dirik, one of the two brothers who made Dalston’s Mangal II what it is (ie the restaurant you’re most likely to find me in if you are ever hunting me for sport), and Bib Gourmand-addict David Carter, of Smokestak and Manteca and OMA and Agora. It smells good, it sounds good, all the choices of tile texture are purringly mature. It’s sort of like being on a date with a sexy older man in a turtleneck and knowing that yes, despite yourself, you’re going to do something appalling later in his car.

Kid restaurant . I have made the mistake of coming with an eater who has a shellfish allergy, which means my grand ambition of starting the meal with “every meze” is foiled: I make eyes at every bowl of taramasalata that goes past me for the rest of the night, every plate of bluefin ezme. It feels ludicrous to spend so much of a paragraph on dips, but here we are: the smoked aubergine and garlic (a perfect temper of smoky and creamy, topped with a handful of potato straw-like grains, a dip that made me say “oh MY!” out loud, a phrase I have never actually said before) and muhammara (red pepper with even more walnuts on the side and a crumble of white cheese, which had me scooping it into my mouth) were both laugh-with-surprise brilliant, and came with puffy, perfect, blackened-off-the-grill pides.

. There was other stuff, too — a fried-and-stuffed courgette flower served with a just-so dribble of honey, which snapped with green bite; the house sucuk, served with a blob of grilled peach puree, worked so it was bouncy and healthy like an Olympic pommel horse medallist; the lamb belly with sweetbreads, a three-skewer arrangement they could use as January if they ever need to make an erotic calendar about the Maillard reaction, which came nestled on a half-bowl of exceptional grilled onions; some pickles I would compare to the best in the city. But we’re wasting time.