Ben Chapman, Smoking Goat Founder
Smoking Goat founder Ben Chapman is to open Kiln in Soho on September 30th. Kiln will be a side-of-the-road-type restaurant, with a short grill menu plus a speciality daily noodle dish. The cooking is inspired by the rural simplicity of the Thai borderlands where dishes combining Burmese and Yunanese spicing and flavours are cooked over open fire.
Kiln’s menu is based around simple, quick grill dishes, many of which will be cooked on a wood burning kiln oven and grills designed by Ben. As well as looking to Thailand for inspiration, much of the menu has been created around the best British produce available. The kitchen will work from whole animals bred specifically for the restaurant, the fruition of working a year ahead with talented growers and farmers to make a menu hand in hand with the ingredients.
One such dish on the menu will be aged lamb which has been fattened by Cornwall Project farmer Dave Soper – the extra fat covering allowing the meat to be dry-aged for longer, increasing flavour. The lamb skewers ‘Gaeh Ping’ are then grilled over the Kiln’s wood embers and served simply with chilli, cumin and fresh Szechuan pepper grown in Cornwall by Sean O’Neil.
Elsewhere on the grill menu will be northern-style cumin heavy offal larbs; Yunnan-cured sausage; roast suckling pig; and curried cockles. Larger dishes will include roast goose with pickled greens and grilled aged sirloin.
Kiln will also serve a daily-changing speciality noodle dish made with Kiln’s own-recipe chewy egg noodles, starting with Pressed Duck Gravy Noodles. This is loosely based on the Thai comfort food ‘Kuaytiaw Pet Tuun’, an aromatic broth enriched by the juices of roasted duck carcasses crushed in a custom-built press.
“Many of Kiln’s recipes have been developed whilst travelling with the team in the Northern Thai regions, particularly the villages near the Myanmar border where the Chinese influence is most prevalent. As with Smoking Goat our aim with Kiln isn’t to replicate these dishes in London, however, but to base what we do around the most flavourful, well sourced ingredients we can get here rather than import”, says Ben Chapman.
As well as creating the menu, Ben has designed and built Kiln’s interiors together with longstanding woodwork collaborator Dan Preston. The restaurant will be a functional, simple space and will feature high stools sat at a long stainless steel counter that curves around the length of the room. The counter will sit in front of an open kitchen where guests can watch chefs preparing and cooking dishes around the kitchen’s centrepiece, the wood burning Kiln.
Kiln’s wine list has been put together by the team over the past twelve months, collecting and storing bottles ready for Kiln’s launch. The list will feature many ‘low intervention wines’ and will be constantly evolving; with only one or two cases of each wine available, once it’s gone it’s gone.
The post Kiln announces opening date: 30th September appeared first on Hospitality & Catering News.