LONDON
FROM THE BIG APPLE TO THE BIG SMOKE … LUNCH AT Twenty8 NoMad
BY SAMANTHA READY
© Mark Anthony Fox
It is no secret that the iK team love their food and seemingly any excuse to pop out for a team lunch. There are occasions however, when a team lunch transcends the merely functional and becomes something rather more memorable. When the room is right, the drinks are considered and the food arrives with enough ambition( and personal attention) to justify extra extravagance. Our recent descent on Twenty8 NoMad was precisely one of those occasions. What was scheduled as a much needed day out working lunch became, somewhere around the second round of cocktails, considerably much more.
The NoMad London occupies one of the most storied addresses in the capital: 28 Bow Street, a building whose walls have witnessed rather more than most. This was, for the better part of two centuries, the Bow Street Magistrates’ Court and Police Station- the very place that processed Oscar Wilde, the Kray twins and once briefly held Augusto Pinochet … If only those walls could talk. The building closed as a court in 2006, and when the NoMad hotel group- the New York hospitality powerhouse behind some of Manhattan’ s most covetable addresses- chose it for their first international outpost in 2021, it felt both audacious and entirely right.
The numbers align with pleasing neatness: NoMad New York lived on 28th Street; the London hotel sits at number 28. Twenty8 NoMad, then, was always an inevitability.
The restaurant occupies what was once the building’ s central atrium, and it is- I’ ll say it plainly- one of the most commanding dining rooms in the capital. Not beautiful in the hushed reverential sense, but alive in a way that makes you sit up straighter the moment you enter. Soaring Victorian ceilings rise above encircling balconies with their original ornate ironwork, the whole space shifting with a quality of light that shifts dramatically depending on the hour and season. Where the original hotel restaurant played it relatively safe- paler tones, a cautious kind of elegance- Martin Brudnizki Design Studio’ s reimagining has introduced genuine personality: deep forest greens, burnished brass fittings, rattan, marble and leather that’ s been broken in rather than merely expensive, and a collection of antiques and artworks that feel genuinely gathered rather than curated to a brief. There’ s something of a grand Southern house about it- whitewashed pillars, palm fronds dancing in the light- crossed with the particular confidence of a Manhattan brasserie that’ s never needed to prove itself.
In fact every inch of the spaces we explored, from the sleek polished bar with its high stools and ingenious signature serves including the Oaxacan Old Fashioned that generated the most animated table discussion( in place of bourbon, a considered marriage of mezcal and tequila carries the familiar architecture of the classic while introducing a smoky, mineral earthiness that belongs to the volcanic soils of southern Mexico) to the simply incredible toilets that follow the footprint of the cells reimagined into boudoir territory, were design masterpieces in their own right.
The kitchen operates under culinary director Bryce Shuman, whose formative years at Eleven Madison Park and subsequent Michelin star at his own Betony in New York represent rather impressive credentials. Day-to-day, the stoves- including the most impressive wood-fired grill that dominates one end of the dining space and is fired up daily for evening service- are led by executive chef Zak Gregoire, and between them they’ ve crafted a menu that resists easy categorisation- Italian in places, American brasserie in others, with a consistent thread of quality and sourcing running through everything. The concept positions itself somewhere between
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