In September 2020 I wrote an article for the FT and this website entitled Why restaurateurs don’t like Mondays.
In it I explained why an increasing number of restaurateurs now choose to close their restaurants on this particular day of the week. There are fewer customers around; those that are, tend not to want to drink after the weekend, so spend less; and closing completely for one day of the week allows the team, as well as the building, to have one day of rest after the busy weekend and in the lead up to the next.
The aftermath of the pandemic coupled with the Brexit vote coming into law, two factors that caused many restaurant staff to leave the UK and head home, has reinforced this practice. With limited resources, it may well be in restaurateurs’ best interests to focus on the busier days of the week, Wednesday to Sunday and simply forget about Mondays, and possibly even Tuesdays in some cases. I did end this article with the following statement, ‘Perhaps the handful of restaurants that buck this trend will reap the benefit?’
This seemed to sum up the scene outside Kiln in Soho when we arrived there shortly after 6.30 one recent Monday evening. I was pleased to find Kiln on the list of restaurants open on a Monday night on Eater London as it was a restaurant that I had long wanted to visit and, because it was a Monday, I managed to book a table for two.
That did not mean that the restaurant was empty. In fact it was packed, with quite a number of people waiting forlornly outside. We managed to squeeze in through the front door and then, via the minute passageway between the backs of guests sitting at the long counter and the wall opposite where a number of their coats are hanging, to find a smiling receptionist who then led us downstairs to their dining room, which seats a further 20 at tables of twos and fours.
But that was long enough for me to get a glimpse of a long, narrow, open and seemingly very happy kitchen which specialises in the cooking of southern Thailand. Kiln is an offshoot of the equally popular Smoking Goat restaurant in Shoreditch although the latter has more space and a bigger kitchen. Both were founded by chef Ben Chapman and both clearly state their culinary aims at the bottom of the single sheet of printed menu which reads. ‘Our cooking is influenced by the regions where Thailand borders Burma, Laos and Yunnan. Our approach is guided by our sourcing of British produce.’ And it continues, ‘Grower Sean O’Neil and Thai Tana [a Thai wholesaler based in Wembley] supply our Thai and Chinese herbs and vegetables’, before ending with the warning, ‘some of the dishes are very spicy, however we can usually adjust to your taste’.
The scene on the ground floor was vastly different from that downstairs. About 25 people were sitting at the counter directly opposite the cooks, the grills and the steam. The vast majority of the cooks were young men, most of them wearing black T-shirts, several of which carried the logo of Climpson & Sons, the east London coffee roasters, one even, incredibly in this heat, wearing a black woollen beanie. They seemed very relaxed, particularly when they served the two young women sitting at the next table to us who had the air of influencers.
We were taken to a corner table in the basement (under one of the speakers) and handed the single sheet of paper which combined that night’s menu and, on the reverse, the wine and drinks list. The latter comprises several beers, five whisky and sodas (including Paul John Brilliance, distilled in Goa, and Suntory) as well as half a dozen natural reds and whites and three under the heading ‘skin contact’. Most interesting perhaps, in the top right-hand corner, are five cocktails made with ingredients from the kitchen. From these we chose two: tequila, ginger and lime and dark rum, tamarind and citrus. Both were delicious and served with plenty of ice, which somewhat mitigated the heat of the food.
It is at this point that I would just like to make two points clear.
The first is that we were the oldest customers in Kiln by at least 30 years and possibly more. The rest of the room was populated by smiling young men and women, predominantly women, who were obviously attracted by the style of the food as well as its pricing. The style of service reflected this: communal dishes that held forks and spoons; metal stools rather than more comfortable chairs; while the shelves were pretty full of the kitchen’s dry goods. For these guests, a visit to Kiln was the substitute for a cheap flight to the beaches of southern Thailand, a pleasure denied them for the last two years.
The second is that most if not all the dishes on offer are spicy-hot-hot-hot, all of it given extra heat by the addition of certain ingredients that were outside our ken (what are ubon relish and kapi and just what is a ‘northern curry’ for example? Tam probably knows.) Robbie, our cheerful South African waiter, confirmed that the six seemingly extremely diverse dishes we had ordered would be more than enough, suggested that we ordered a dish of brown jasmine rice ‘to cool everything off’ and we were off on a voyage of discovery.
We began with the dish shown at the top of the article (also featuring the only pearls in the place) that was innocuously mild, described as a clay pot of baked glass noodles with Tamworth (a breed of pig, bred by Fred Price, a Somerset farmer) belly and brown crab meat. What this description omitted was that this was served with a bowl of spicy green sauce which we were instructed to mix into the bowl of noodles before eating. This we did and it was delicious with everything disappearing quickly.
There then followed two much hotter dishes: a bowl of curried, fried monkfish with its liver (of which I am a huge fan) and an even hotter dry red curry with fennel and turnip tops, pictured immediately below. A hiatus then ensued until Robbie came to explain that the kitchen seemed to have lost the piece of paper that conveyed the rest of our order. He smiled at my suggestion that it would then all be complimentary.
Three dishes followed. A northern-style spicy laap sausage, perhaps the least distinctive dish on the menu; slow-grilled chicken marinated with soy served with half a lime; and, the hottest dish of all, a northern curry of rabbit with celeriac and fennel tops, where the rabbit meat had been minced and was served in a thin sauce – see below. This was a dish that I would steer clear of in future, the sauce hiding punishingly hot spices.
I paid my bill of £89.72 for the two of us, a bill that included three cocktails and a glass of Roc 2019 from Domaine Vinci in Roussillon. This was without any dessert, coffee or tea, which this restaurant does not offer. This I believe to be an oversight, as the plates of fresh fruit that I have been offered in Thailand have been significant aspects of eating over there. I do not believe, however, that following everything in Thailand is necessarily going to prove popular in the UK as this recent article in The Guardian highlighted.
Kiln 58 Brewer Street, London W1F 9TL
