The menu includes 10 limited-edition burgers a day.
Notting Hill’s new restaurant, Dove, owes its existence to the high price of fish. When super-chef Jackson Boxer found he could no longer make the numbers add up at his upmarket seafood restaurant Orasay, he kept the simple wood and brick décor but changed the name – and completely overhauled the food.
There’s now a short, frequently changing menu of comfort food with a twist. The dishes will all be simple and familiar, but Jackson says you couldn’t make them at home because his signature sauces and marinades can take days to achieve the requisite depth of flavour.
His guiding principle is to make the food that he himself would love to eat, and it’s true – there is literally nothing on the menu that doesn’t seem appealing. Choosing is a delicious agony of indecision.
Thank goodness then for a small list of excellent and unusually cheap cocktails to sample as you debate. Top marks here to the Walnut Old Fashioned. When I order an Old Fashioned, I am often disappointed. This was both smoky and silky smooth.
For starters we settled on a Raw Tuna Tostada with yuzu and fermented pepper – a recent addition to the menu, and a rare misfire, since the tostada was hard and chewy and overpowered the fish – as well as Dove’s already celebrated Fried Potato Pizzette made with creamy burrata, with cold cuts of meat and bonito. Chef Jackson often combines fish and meat to great effect.
This skill was also employed in the Glazed Duck Leg with spring cassoulet and jalapeño pistou that we had for a main. This had a rich and slightly unusual flavour – the secret, as I overheard a server explain to a disappointed guest who was forbidden to order this and a couple of other meat dishes due to her shellfish allergy, is that seafood is used in the overnight marinade. Together with the zingy, almost crunchy vegetables in the cassoulet, this dish was a triumph.
The Steamed Hake with curly shavings of Romana courgette and a Champagne broth was also good, if not as heavenly, with the foamy sauce elegantly counterpointing the solidity of the fish. And it was all washed down with a nice bottle of Pinot Noir that played well to both fish and flesh, priced at £48.
We were too full to do any more than share a dessert, which was a shame as it was superb: the Flourless Chocolate Cake with banana caramel and crème fraiche was light and fluffy yet packed a serious wallop of chocolate – and the gooey banana caramel base gave it a tangy, sticky sweetness that meant we gobbled it up in seconds.
There’s a lot more to save for a return visit, many of them main courses to be shared between two: Wood-Roast Half Herb-Fed Chicken with Café de Paris herb butter is said to be a staple favourite, as is the steak. And we’ll definitely need to return in order to sample Jackson’s reluctant foray into the burger wars. For years, he nursed a prejudice against burgers as a necessarily low-rent dish, before setting himself a challenge: how could he elevate this fast-food staple?
He says that he tried a hundred iterations before hitting on what his Instagram video punchily headlines: “Is this London’s best burger?” It’s 50-day dry-aged grass-fed beef, crisped on the outside and beautifully pink inside; smothered in melted Gorgonzola; and topped with an onion lyonnaise seasoned with Champagne.
Dove styles itself as a “neighbourhood” restaurant, and Notting Hill is a remarkably beautiful one. It nestles in a little block of eateries behind the much-loved Electric Cinema on a street lined with imposing Georgian houses. And browsing in the quirky antique and vintage clothing shops is great for working up an appetite.
It’s worth the trip. The prices are reasonable given the quality, the atmosphere is relaxed, and the service is friendly. Now, here comes the “but”: to maintain that meat quality, Dove makes just ten burgers a night. I thought that in sitting down for dinner at 6.30pm, I’d be safe to bag one; especially since, as with the celebrated burgers at the late lamented Covent Garden theatre restaurant Jo Allen’s, they’re not even listed on the menu. (It’s a case of “if you know, you know.”) But no! All gone. Already.
So, whether these really are London’s best burgers, we’ll have to leave it to you to discover.
GO: Visit https://dove.london for more information.