I've been out for a far too many quick, convenience driven meals recently and a lot of time this doesn't do the good food justice. Sometimes it's nice to go wild and book a table and spend more than hour in a restaurant. OK it's costs a bit more but at the end of the day you are the customer, you owe it to yourself to take your time order the second bottle of wine, have the dessert and linger over coffee. So in that spirit we had a dinner party out with our neighbours last week. They suggested the Dock Kitchen which is up the Kensal Rise end of Ladbroke Grove. It's a very impressive building from the outside, a converted canal side wharf house which has lots of glass walls and a very enticing outside decking area. I've run past it a few times and thought about trying it out so was pleased they picked it. We were nicely greeted on entering and shown through the open kitchen to our table. As you perhaps know I love an open kitchen, it shows confidence from the restaurant and watching chefs work and interact is always fun.
They had on a couple of menus on that Friday, a very interesting looking mezze and a more conventional but nevertheless eclectic a la carte. We went a la carte. I started with a very nice Keralan curry whilst the others Labneh, chicken livers and soup. All were well appreciated. We also had several rounds of the fantastic house baked flat breads. The mains were really good I had a very tasty Korean Shortrib dish with Kimchi, there was also a very nice Lebanese influence chicken dish but the star of the show was the freshly baked Lamb Byriani delivered pastry crust intact to our table, a real show stopper. Obviously not all restaurants can do this but it's always good when they can. I subsequently saw a similar effort at the nearby Parlour where a whole chicken cooked in salted pastry was delivered to a table. All our food went down very well helped along by a couple of bottles of light French red.
Desserts were less impressive the home made salted caramel ice cream was good but my lovely wife ordered a very odd strawberry ice cream sandwich which was ice cream in sandwiched in a very unremarkable overly dense Madeleine bun. Not good enough in view of the excellent food we had up to then. The dessert was left uneaten and we mentioned it to serving staff, I was surprised it wasn't taken off the bill. However that slip apart this was very enjoyable grown up dining. With the nearby Parlour, Paradise and here there are some seriously good places to eat in Kensal Rise. Nice to see a striking restaurant space matched by great food. The bill with service came to £60 a head which was very fair for a proper 2 hour 3 course meal.
Thursday, August 07, 2014
Overall rating
Food 8 | Service 7 | Atmosphere 8 | Value for money 8
took my mum and brother back here for lunch which they enjoyed. Only daft bit of the restaurant is their tap water which they serve with a great lump of charcoal! proper Get in the Sea behaviour but then this is hipster West London!