Brave the crowds on Regent Street and Carnaby Street in London’s West End; ignore the charms of Dishoom, Kolamba and Dehesa on Kingly Street; and follow the signs for Dirty Bones and Pizza Pilgrims. Walk into the narrow passageway that leads you into the heart of Kingly Court, effectively a busy food court, turn sharp left and walk to the far end. You will now be facing the glass-fronted windows and the front door of Alta restaurant.
Walk in. To your left you will be confronted by a phalanx of tall, shiny taps which dispense ready-mixed cocktails, ciders, waters, beers and keg wines behind which the waiting staff congregate. To your right you will see a large, extremely clean open kitchen, lit by a dozen heat lamps almost as bright as Wembley Stadium, that is invariably manned by a brigade of the young and bearded in chef’s whites. Standing by the middle of three rows of workstations is 41-year-old head chef Rob Roy Cameron.
I saw and heard a great deal of him as I enjoyed my first dinner sitting on Table 6 right by the restaurant’s front door. I watched him as he quietly called the orders that he received from his printer. I watched him as he received the cooked dishes from his various chefs on the different sections of his kitchen: Carlingford oysters topped with gazpacho from the larder section; a delicious sourdough roll from a young, slightly nervous-looking young man; a large piece of ribeye straight from the open grill; and, from the same chef, the whole red mullet which I watched him cover with a mild pil pil sauce before it was brought to me.
With this, I enjoyed a couple of glasses of fino sherry from Bodegas César Florido (£8 each); a green salad; and a dish described simply as ‘charlotte potatoes, mojo verde’. This side dish, shown above, is a delicious disc of crisp potatoes topped with a smaller disc of spicy green sauce which came straight out of the fridge, then began to melt, having been helped on its way by a blast from Cameron’s small blowtorch. For dessert, I ordered ‘chocolate, bread and olive oil’, a dish that reminded me of a wonderful dessert we had once enjoyed in the Marina district of San Francisco. With 15% service and a £1 donation to the unimpeachable StreetSmart, I paid my bill of £97.60.
I returned the following week with JR on a night when Cameron was off. We began with a glass of white Rioja from Ruiz Jiménez (the 2018 Pago de Valcaliente Reserva at £16), and a glass of that old favourite, Marcel Lapierre 2024 Beaujolais (£13), both in excellent condition. To accompany them we decided on a tour around Alta’s small plates. We began with an excellent dish of sea bass crudo topped with an intriguing, deep pink sauce made with plums, lemon vinegar and blackcurrant sage that had just the right amount of acidity.
We followed this with a dish of very finely sliced sweet squid topped with melted lardo in a deep red Vizcaina sauce made from dried choricero peppers grown in Rioja, and a thin pancake of mild pork trotters, beef tongue and tripe (delicious! and shown above). Dessert was the chocolate combo I had enjoyed (though JR found it a tad too sweet) and the creamy Basque cheesecake shown below. Its recipe was made famous by San Sebastián’s cafe La Vina. We shared a glass of Moscatel Oro sherry (£12), also a bit too sweet, and a bill of £143.02.
It was at this stage of our meal that a tour upstairs was to reveal quite how big a restaurant Alta is. On my first visit I had seen the waiting staff disappear up the stairs carrying trays of food and I assumed that there must be a private dining room on the first floor. There is but there is also a sizeable room devoted to wine, with numerous bottles round its walls and, half a floor further up, another even larger room devoted to cocktails. Both are already pretty popular on Friday and Saturday evenings, I was informed.
Alta is therefore much bigger than the 30 covers on the ground floor plus the additional 18 available when the sun shines and the glass doors at the front are folded back. ‘On those all too few days in early October when the sun shone and the breeze blew through the kitchen, it did feel Mediterranean’, Cameron confessed when I went to meet him after my two meals. ‘I did feel that I was back in Barcelona. Briefly.’
So my first question when I sat down opposite Cameron was not that straightforward: how had he, a chef born in Botswana, South Africa, ended up cooking Spanish food in a large restaurant that can seat 120 in a building in central London surrounded by lots of competition selling predominantly pizza, ribs and noodles? (See below for the board at Kingly Court.)
Cameron smiled before explaining. ‘Over the past decade I’ve been cooking mainly in Barcelona and also here in London when I was head chef at Gazelle in Mayfair, which was, sadly, short-lived. But I worked for a long time with Albert Adrià [brother of Ferran A] from whom I learnt a great deal. Most notably, that any restaurant is a reflection of how the team feels and my role, away from when service is taking place, is to ensure that they are well and happy. And it was from Adrià when he said that the name of his new restaurant in Barcelona would be Tickets that I learnt the importance of a restaurant name that is easily pronounceable in English. And the word Alta has several references in Spain.
‘Alta came about’, Cameron continued, ‘rather as a series of accidents, of happenstance. I had returned to London intent on opening a restaurant that focused on Spanish food and wine and I was introduced to Artem Login who had founded a string of cafés, about 40 I believe, in seven different countries. He wanted to move into restaurants and opened MAD restaurant group which has MOI, a Japanese restaurant in Wardour Street, Soho, and now Alta.
‘We were encouraged by Shaftesbury Capital who are now our landlords. When the previous tenant decided to leave, they wanted something more sophisticated. We all looked at three possible sites before we finally settled here and we opened here a couple of months ago, on 22 September to be precise.’ MAD’s involvement explains where the capital comes from and the extremely professional finish of the building’s interior.
But money alone cannot explain the staff’s general enthusiasm for Alta and what it represents. Their 15-page wine list, compiled under the beady eye of the superbly named Jefferson Goldring (ex Lyle’s), bristles with a wide variety of (principally low-intervention) white, orange, red and sparkling wines as well as a page devoted to fortified wines. On a page headed ‘Nada’ are 11 drinks without alcohol. As I was handed the list by a waiter, he added, ‘We only list wines we really enjoy drinking ourselves.’
As I said goodbye and thanked Cameron, I asked him a question that I know I really should not ask the chef of a restaurant that has been open for just two months. But nevertheless, I persisted, ‘Are you happy with Alta?’ He smiled ruefully. ‘Yes’, he answered quite positively. ‘We are definitely making progress and all the numbers are going in the right direction. There have been quite a few changes in personnel but I think that that is quite normal for any opening.’ (It certainly was in my day!) ‘And we are learning to adapt to the building. I am happy and I trust all our customers are when they leave’, he added with a smile.
Alta 9 Kingly Court, Carnaby Street, London W1B 5PW; tel: +44 (0)204 628 0116
Every Sunday, Nick writes about restaurants. To stay abreast of his reviews, sign up for our weekly newsletter.
