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The Guardian
20-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Dove, London: ‘inventive, unusual, tantalising'
Dove, 31 Kensington Park Road, London W11 2EU (020 7043 1400; Starters £4-£16; mains £12-£33; wine from £35 I am a potentially dull person to eat with. However much I love and relish food, food is not my friend and I have a host of verbotens, ranging from garlic, onion and chives, which for me are headache-inducing, to butter, which I have always hated. Each meal in a new restaurant where I'm not familiar with the idiosyncrasies of the menu begins, 'Do you have anything without garlic?' My meal might end up seeming plain to an onlooker, but this plainness divulges so many nuanced flavours – a grilled chop floods my nervous system with relaxing endorphins. The pleasure of eating something that agrees with me is in itself a huge delight. Offered the chance to be a restaurant critic for a day, my first thought was who would be the most fun to invite as my date. A sadly long-departed film producer friend called Hercules Bellville – Hercy – pronounced that the most important thing about a restaurant was the amount of space between the tables. In his book, food came about third on the list. I agree in part – for me the thing that matters most is the atmosphere. But my number one priority is who I get to converse with, and how much they will enjoy all the things denied to me that I can vicariously experience. For the last 10 years I have been going for lunch with the brilliant fashion journalist Tim Blanks. He has taken me for birthday lunches at our local Japanese. We have discussed music, fashion and politics in great detail. He normally drinks the most fabulous-sounding concoctions while I benefit from the contact high. Tim accepted my offer of lunch at chef-owner Jackson Boxer's new restaurant Dove on Ladbroke Grove's Kensington Park Road in London, which opened in early January; we were already fans of its previous incarnation, the seafood restaurant Orasay, which occupied the same spot and closed on New Year's Eve 2024. Someone told me that Dove has this incredible burger on the menu made from 50-day dry-aged beef, with gorgonzola on top. They only make something like 15 portions per day and they sell out within minutes. We missed them, but there were other tantalising delicacies to deliberate over. Tim and I usually dawdle for hours, analysing the most recent fashion gossip and the current switcheroo creative director merry-go-round. He had to rush off sooner than usual to get an exclusive phone scoop direct from Haider Ackermann on his Tom Ford debut, so we ordered fast. A few weeks earlier Tim tripped on a tiny kerb differential and somehow managed to break his arm in three places and smash a few ribs. He started the meal with a glass of Château Cantemerle, a Bordeaux that doesn't usually come by the glass and was one of the 'Weekly Specials Pours By Glass' – so that was nice. I opted for a non-alcoholic drink called Jin Jin with lime and soda, which was slightly sweet and vinegary, which is something I adore and find delicious. The menu at Dove is inventive with unusual combinations, which are tantalising even for me who is wary of too much artistry in cooking. Writing this a few hours later I wish I had ordered more dishes, but to start I opted for raw scallop, finger lime, chicken salt, potato cake. Tim chose fried-potato pizzette, bonito, burrata, mortadella, but without the mortadella as he doesn't eat meat, and I don't like mortadella. Both of these starters were so light, with flavours that kept emerging and multiplying with every tiny bite. The potato bases of both were fried, but somehow cloudlike in their enhancing functions as a base. My morsels of scallops on top of the finger lime were so moreish and each taste was both exquisite and balanced, like an orchestral composition. What was relaxing, too, was the lack of annoyance or resistance we met with when asked to remove things like the mortadella from the potato pizzette, which was insanely good even without it: rich in taste and feather-light to consume. For our main we went for grilled wild sea bream, confit garlic (which I didn't touch) and guindilla peppers for two. Looking around, I spied bowls of chunky-looking duck fat fries, so we ordered them, too, with a bitter leaf salad. The sea bream arrived, opened and flat with its head flattened like a hammerhead shark. The addition of a few elegant guindilla peppers scattered over it turned it into a scene from a meal in Breaking Bad. This fish was out of this world, so fresh and light it fell off under the fork, which was good for Tim's left-hand manoeuvring. It was so tasty and flavoursome that we barely bothered with the chips (unheard of). The bitter leaf salad was as high class an arrangement of leaves as you could get, but again the fish… Tim said the confit garlic didn't really add anything, but it was because the bream didn't need anything. For pudding we both ordered Estate Dairy fior di latte soft serve, early harvest olive oil, oat cookies and a coffee cardamom caramel cream to share. The fior di latte ice-cream arrived like two Mr Whippy's, with a light sheen of pale olive oil adorning its ripples like tiny rivulets. It almost didn't matter what it tasted like, it had so much charm – though it was daintily appetising and freezing, accompanied by warm, just-baked oatmeal cookies. The pièce de résistance was the tiny little bomb of flavour that was the coffee cardamom caramel: sweet but not sweet, the texture like a memory from a 19th-century novel. It hit the heart and woke up your appetite all over again. It made you crazy with desire. That is a real art in cooking. The food at Dove is amazing. The décor is simple and elegant; light floods in from the windows at the front, and further in there is a roof light that makes for soft, flattering, European-style ambience. The staff who work there are attentive, efficient, friendly and no one asked us whether we were enjoying our meal. Next week, David Baddiel goes to Mana in Manchester
Telegraph
27-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
William Sitwell reviews Dove, Notting Hill: ‘It's good but it's not right'
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.'
