William Sitwell reviews Dove, Notting Hill: ‘It's good but it's not right'

Telegraph

27-02-2025

Jackson Boxer seems to have it all. He has the DNA. His grandmother is Arabella Boxer, one of the great British cookery writers, whose saintly name is uttered in the same breath as Elizabeth David. His father and brother are well known figures in hospitality, his mother's fine cooking inspired him from childhood, and his CV features his own acclaimed establishments of Brunswick House and Orasay. And what a name too! As if he won a great parlour game and got to keep the name (childhood pop hero and type of dog that first bit you).
Now from this charmed man comes Dove, slap-bang in the heart of Notting Hill and an energetic rethink of the place formerly known as Orasay (a seafood restaurant named after the paradise Hebridean island of his childhood).
The decor remains the same but the menu presents a new concept. And Jackson stalks the floor with warmth, fans and friends seemingly on every other table.
There's a lot of love going on at Dove. It's nicely lit, wonderfully cosy, a long passage of a place, and Boxer's coviviality rubs off on the staff who are attentive and professional.
All of which accentuates the imbalance of what should be a heavenly Dove but whose scales tip in favour of the cooking flaws, from flavour to conception.
There is, for example, a dream-like offer in the house wines 'served from the keg'. And when I hear such words I'm almost violently wanting the wine to succeed. Yet two of the three whites I tried were acrid and lacked smoothness (a viognier and a chardonnay) and a red carafe of gamay was limp and disappointing.
The food, a sort of modern British assembly of current fashions, started well with fluffy and well-textured focaccia and a delicious raw scallop dancing beautifully on the crunch of a hash brown.
But then came a plate of tasty fava beans – whipped according to the menu though you wouldn't know it as there was no extra air. They seemed to have been simply blended, and came with a pile of long and stringy chicory on top. The tendrils were a never-ending torturous journey, like dragging an obnoxious weed from a flower bed. The 'Szechuan crumb' was all crumb with not a jot of lip-tingling spice.
And the promise of a dish of 'ricotta dumplings, lobster cream, lime leaf' delivered heavy little pasta weapons in a sauce so reduced it left only an intense umami flavour that was more Bovril than sweet, delicate seafood. Just the ticket for a food fight but not the peaceful promise of a dove.
Yet the grilled prawns were magnificently on song; soft, suckable and sweet, and enhanced by butter made, apparently, with smoked garlic. They were on a par with a wonderful dish of bavette steak, chewy in the best way, with oodles of flavour and little morels to jolly one along, as well as dots of smoked bone marrow.
A dish of duck fat fries tasted far too factory-made industrial with no additional crunch or ducky depth. It was also far too large, which mirrored the concept of the Castelfranco: a giant plate of the crunchy leaves, with some cute pecans lurking, but frankly an oversized folly.
There was fun and pleasure in a creamy soft serve with oat biscuits so homemade they tasted like the ones you make your kids, but a caramel cream had the flaws of those dumplings; so firm you could have sat on it.
To quote the great Roy Walker of Catchphrase: 'It's good but it's not right.'