Imad’s Syrian, Kitchen, Top floor, Kingly Court, Carnaby Street, London W1B 5PW (020 7434 2448). Small plates £5.50-£8, large plates £9-£15, desserts £5-£6, wine from £26 a bottle
With some restaurants, it’s all about the story. Imad’s Syrian Kitchen is one of them. Imad Alarnab, a round-shouldered man with the sort of soft smile that tells you everything is going to be OK, was a successful chef and restaurateur in Damascus. He ran three restaurants in the city alongside cafés and juice bars. It took just six days at the height of the Syrian war for them all to be destroyed. In 2015, he left to find a better life for his family. He would send for them later. He made his way to Calais where, for 64 days, he slept on the steps of a church. During the day he cooked for fellow refugees, up to 400 of them at a time.
Eventually, he made it to London, where he was given asylum and was able to make good on his promise to his family, who joined him. At first, he worked as a car salesman. But he wasn’t a car salesman, he was a chef. So he started doing that instead. He ran supper clubs and pop-up restaurants and falafel bars, raising thousands of pounds for the charity Choose Love, which works with refugees just like Alarnab. Later, he raised a further £50,000 through a crowdfunder for his own permanent restaurant. It was due to open last December. Now, finally, here it is in the space off London’s Carnaby Street previously occupied by Asma Khan’s Darjeeling Express; a white-walled, floorboarded room suffused with light beneath a beamed ceiling. It gives the sense of being tucked into the eaves of a house, away from the chaos of the world. Fair enough. Alarnab knows more than enough about the chaos of the world.
My job is to tell you whether a restaurant is any good. Surely that job has been done. Imad’s Syrian Kitchen represents all the good things. It’s a hell of a story. Once upon a time I would have felt like a mere observer, but as the dismal anti-immigration rhetoric has intensified, as the little Englanders have frothed at the mouth about those who have the audacity to flee war and desolation, as if the search for better was a personal insult, I have increasingly felt myself to have skin in the game. I am the great-grandchild of earlier refugees who came looking for better and gave more than they took.
Or to put it in terms relevant to a restaurant column, we do not have a more diverse restaurant sector than any other country in Europe by accident. It’s the product of waves of immigration. And yes, of course, some of that is also the product of rampant imperialism; the two things are often fellow travellers. Still, the fact is that if you enjoy eating the food of the Indian subcontinent, or of China and the Middle East, or of West and East Africa, of Thailand and Japan and Poland and all other points of the compass, cooked by people schooled from birth in its intricacies, you should give thanks for immigration. You should give thanks to people like Imad Alarnab, some of whom have risked their lives to be here. I know this is all bloody obvious, but sometimes the obvious needs to be said.
The menu he has brought with him is short and to the point. On the left are eight meat-free small plates for between £5.50 and £8; on the right are five larger chicken and lamb mains for between £9 and £15. The short wine list, weirdly, is less welcoming price-wise; surely they can find a reasonable red wine to sell for less than £26 or a white for less than £31, currently the opening prices. I hope so. Then again £1 from every bill will be donated to Choose Love. Few dish descriptions will startle anybody reasonably versed in the Middle Eastern repertoire, though they have their own idiosyncrasies. The hummus here is a cheerily rugged and punchy affair, topped with whole chickpeas, micro greens, dribbles of olive oil and the purple promise of sumac. There are warm, pillow-soft rounds of flatbread puffing hot air at you as you tear into them.
His sesame seed-studded falafel, which brought him so much love shortly after he arrived in London, are shaped not as familiar balls, but as thick discs with a hole in the middle. An online search suggests this is specifically Syrian, but please do educate me. The result, of course, is more surface area crunch to spiced interior. More crunch is always a good thing, as are the ribbons of pickled onions with which they are topped and the puddle of tahini beneath. The star dish is the baba ghanoj, the smoky aubergine purée presented in the crisped skin and topped with pomegranate seeds and dribbles of more tahini. The only duff note is a rocket salad with “noodles” of squeaky halloumi. Turning halloumi into noodles does not stop it being the underachiever of the cheese world. There are cubes of watermelon and a dusting of za’atar, too, but it needs more of a dressing to get it moving.
From the other side of the menu we have chargrilled and crisp-skinned chicken thighs, on a tomatoey mess of bulgur wheat alongside a chilli sauce that creeps in quietly then slaps you cheerily round the face. Because this kitchen roasts aubergine so well we have more of them filled with spiced minced lamb, on a bed of torn, crisped flatbread designed to soak up the juices. At the end there are squares of their own dense baklava with toffeed filo pastry, plus rounds of dense pistachio ice-cream, wearing a bonnet of candy floss. Alarnab delivers this himself. He tells me it is a Damascene speciality. It is, as the best desserts are, a childish delight.
While the ice-cream may be specifically located to Damascus, much of this menu’s basics really are familiar. That same story of refugees and immigration means we are rich in experience in the UK. Lucky us. But there’s something else going on here that makes it as sweet as the tangled knot of candy floss at the end. In between serving dishes and tidying away plates, Alarnab spends time with his family who, he tells me with a sweet grin, happen to be here dining in their dad’s restaurant for the first time. It’s the simplest of stories, isn’t it? A father feeding his teenage kids. But the journey that brought them to that table, in this calming, whitewashed room, high above London, is anything but.
News bites
The highly regarded Sheffield restaurant Jöro is launching a very boutique hotel – it will only have four bedrooms – close by the mothership. The hotel will have a 10-seat chef’s table offering ticketed experiences cooked both by Jöro head chef Luke French and high-profile guest chefs. All four bedrooms and the table will be bookable by single groups of eight. Visit jororestaurant.co.uk.
The 02 Arena in London’s docklands is to become the proud host of the largest Gordon Ramsay Street Burger to open yet. The two-floor space will seat 175 and, as with the other four outlets which have already opened in London, will offer a burger, fries and unlimited soft drinks for £15. They have also opened four London sites trading under the name Street Pizza, which suggests they may not be that au fait with current slang. Or they are, but think they’re funny. Which they aren’t. At gordonramsayrestaurants.com.
Boxpark, which generally operates food courts out of shipping containers, is to open Boxhall in Bristol, its first venture outside London. They are redeveloping 20,000 sq ft of sheds overlooking the water close to the city centre. It will have seven kitchens and two terraces and is the first of what they say will be around 10 new sites across the UK. See boxpark.co.uk.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
