Kid Soho Review: I’d Go Back, But I’d Order Very Differently
Kid Soho Review: I’d Go Back, But I’d Order Very Differently
At Kid Soho, the small plates beat the showstopper
Kid Soho has been open for more than a month by the time I finally waddle in, 7 months pregnant. It’s embarrassingly late by my usual standards, but very much on brand for the third trimester.
By this point, the PR machine has done its work. The early hype has hardened into mostly glowing media coverage, the TikToks have circulated, and Kid has settled into that dangerous category of new London restaurant where you feel slightly behind before you’ve even booked.
After Impala, it might be the second hypiest opening of the year. Which means expectations are not exactly low.
I arrive on a Friday lunchtime in October and there is Sertaç Dirik at the pass, watching dishes leave the kitchen. Dirik is the chef who helped turn his family’s Mangal II in Dalston into one of London’s most interesting modern Turkish restaurants. He’s now teamed up with David Carter, the restaurateur behind Manteca, Oma and Agora, which explains some of the heat around the place before you’ve even taken your coat off.
So, yes, there are all the ingredients for a brilliant lunch. Or, possibly, a very expensive overhyped one.
As it turns out, Kid restaurant in Soho is neither a disaster nor a clean sweep. It can be very good – if you know what to order.
Quick info on Kid Soho
- Restaurant: Kid
- Where: Soho, London
- Cuisine: Modern Turkish, fire-led cooking
- Must order: Muhammara dip, tombik pide, courgette flower, quail, kahve
- Skip: Kid with freekeh, rice pudding
- Price: We paid around £85pp with sparkling water and soft drinks
- Would I go back? Yes, but only for breads, dips, small plates and Turkish coffee
- Details: Party of 2 . Meal paid for by us independently
Find out more in the full Kid Soho restaurant review below.
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The room is moody, but lunch could use more daylight
Kid Soho is dark, woody and spotlight-heavy, which probably works beautifully at dinner.
At lunch, I find it slightly annoying. There are big windows practically begging to be useful, but instead the room leans into a kind of afternoon gloom, with dark walls, dark tables and little pools of light dropping onto the food. Atmospheric? Kinda. Necessary at midday? I’m less convinced.
The tables for two are also tiny for the amount of food they’re expected to hold. By the time you add water, glasses, drinks and plates, it all starts feeling a bit like table Jenga. We end up asking for small plates instead of larger dinner plates just to claw back a bit of space.
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The Kid menu is best approached with strategy
The Kid Soho menu is built around breads, dips, grilled things and larger sharing dishes, with enough Turkish influence to feel rooted and enough cheffy polish to make it distinctly Soho.
The danger is assuming the biggest dish is automatically the best order.
It isn’t.
After eating here, I think the smartest way through the Kid Soho menu is breads, dips, small plates, maybe a kebab, then Turkish coffee. That’s where the pleasure is. That’s where the kitchen feels confident, generous and sharp.
The big signature dish is not so worth it. We’ll get to that.
The muhammara dip and tombik pide are worth going for alone
The muhammara dip at Kid Soho is wonderful.
I’ve loved this dip since first eating it decades ago in the Gulf, and Kid’s version is glossy, deep and full of flavour: rough walnuts, red pepper, crumbled cheese and more chopped toasted walnuts alongside.
It has sweetness, smoke, nuttiness, richness, salt. The peynir (cheese) is not just decoration either; it changes the bite, sharpening and softening everything at once.
Then comes the tombik pide, puffed, slightly charred and slicked with oil. We pull it open and it’s airy and spongy inside, somewhere between focaccia and naan, which is exactly as good as that sounds.
Drag that bread through the red muhammara, sweep up the salty cheese, catch a few walnuts on the way, and honestly, I could stop here and call lunch a success.
The grilled pide needs a little more time
The Wildfarmed grilled pide is smaller, flatter and denser.
I like it, but it doesn’t have the joy of the tombik. When we prise it open, a few sections look a touch underdone, turning doughy again under pressure. Perhaps that’s the 12pm lunch slot and the kitchen still settling into its rhythm, but another few moments on the heat would have helped.
Not bad. Just not the bread to prioritise.
The small plates are where Kid starts making sense
The courgette flower is excellent, cut open to reveal generous, cheesy softness, lifted by Turkish chilli flakes and honey. It is rich, warm, sweet, spicy and balanced in that very lovely way where you immediately wish there were two more.
The grilled quail with ezme is also delicious, even if it looks larger in videos than it does in person. Quails are, annoyingly, tiny. Still, it’s butterflied, nicely charred, humming with flavour and supple rather than dry.
There are moments to enjoy with the lamb belly, sweetbreads and grilled onions too. The lamb belly is soft and jellied in places, crackly and charred in others, with fully-charged savoury depth. The sweetbreads slide from the skewer beautifully.
But the balance is off, with too much onion for the amount of meat, and once the lamb and sweetbreads are gone, the onions don’t quite have enough sweetness or softness to carry the dish alone.
A bit more heat, a bit more meat, and this could be fantastic.
The £75 kid with freekeh looks better than it eats
Because the restaurant is called Kid, and because the dish costs £75, we feel almost obliged to order the kid with freekeh.
It arrives in a big clay pot, opened at the table, and visually it absolutely does the job. A hunk of kid meat sits on top of freekeh and chickpeas, with pickles and garlic yoghurt alongside. It looks like a showstopper.
Then we try to eat it.
We’re given two spoons to pull the meat from the bone, but the meat is not soft enough for that. It’s dry, fairly flavourless, and takes more chewing than a £75 sharing dish should require. A real workout for the jaw.
The frustrating thing is that everything underneath is lovely. The freekeh is savoury, wet, porridge-like and beautifully comforting. The pickles and garlic yoghurt bring salt, tang and punch. Eat the kid meat with all of that and the flavour works.
But the meat itself should be the point – and it isn’t.
This is one expensive dish on the Kid Soho menu I wouldn’t order again.
There’s an interesting contradiction here. Kid is at its most convincing when the cooking feels least dressed up: warm bread dragged through muhammara, quail licked by smoke, yoghurt, chilli, char.
The further the meal moves towards the kind of grand centrepiece you expect from an expensive Soho restaurant, the less exciting it becomes. For all the polish around Kid, its best moments are the ones that still feel closest to the elemental pleasures of Turkish cooking.
Dessert is the other miss at Kid Soho
The mountain tea rice pudding with orange blossom sounds far better than it eats.
It comes with custard, a blowtorched sugar disc and blackberries, like a creme brulee/rice pudding hybrid. The texture is varied enough, but the flavour feels muddled. The orange blossom doesn’t sing, there’s a strange tang I can’t quite place, and the blackberries bring more grit than pleasure.
The Turkish coffee, though, is excellent: smooth, deep and almost leathery in its warmth and strength.
I’d skip the rice pudding and end with that.
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Final thoughts on Kid Soho
I would go back to Kid Soho, but I would order very differently.
There is a lot to like at Sertaç Dirik’s new restaurant, and enough excellent cooking here that one disappointing centrepiece doesn’t sink the meal. If anything, it just makes the way I’d eat at Kid next time much clearer.
I’d come back hungry, order far more bread and small plates, ignore the £75 showstopper, and probably have a much better lunch for it.
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Kid Soho restaurant review
Address – Bateman Street, Soho
Nearest Tube – Tottenham Court Road
