Remarkable and elegant: Akub’s dining room
(Picture: Adrian Lourie)Not long after we had ordered at Akub, Franco-Palestinian chef Fadi Kattan’s new restaurant in Notting Hill, two members of the front-of-house team came hustling over. “We’re just going to give you some more room,” said one, as they levered a vacant neighbouring table in beside our two-top to form a kind of overflow car park. Though it felt, in the moment, like a bell rung to advertise our gluttony, it would turn out to be the perfect introduction to this remarkable little restaurant.
Not just because the menu here is the sort where you can very easily end up ordering practically all of it. But also because, as a gesture, it gives a sense of the groaning abundance, elbows-out intimacy and enlivening, domestic warmth that will ultimately define a pleasurable few hours here. Akub (which is named after a hardy, edible thistle) is a stylishly executed and enormously meaningful act of cultural preservation that seeks to champion a food culture too often hazily described as merely Middle Eastern. It is also, however, precisely the kind of place where a cobwebbed emergency table may be pulled from the garden to better accommodate more guests or dishes; a whirling, radically joyful kaleidoscope of shareable labneh balls, herb-swirled tahini and flatbreads jolted by bright, hot, specifically Palestinian intensifiers.
