Fire and flame: Caia
(Picture: Matt Writtle)That Caia makes such a big deal of its soundsystem feels almost like an act of light provocation. Loud music in restaurants is hardly an uncontroversial issue. And so you would wager that this place — a new Notting Hill wine bar from the same team as nearby Fiend — would prefer not to put diners in mind of the cranked stereo at a Joe & The Juice, or a Mayfair “clubstaurant” where there is a high chance of being menaced by a roving saxophonist midway through your black cod.
However, this perceived emphasis on aural pleasure turns out to be a red herring. Yes, the basement here, a snug, crate-digger’s nirvana of racked vinyl, soft lighting and funk tunes, is undoubtedly a focus. But it is chef Jessica Donovan’s live fire cooking that truly seals this as, for my money, one of the best openings of the year — though I’m not sure you would think much of it to look in from the street. Set on Goldborne Road, Caia (named after the Roman goddess of fire) sits in a subtly signposted space beside an old-school Palestinian restaurant and beneath Trellick Tower. Scurrying in on a drizzly weeknight, its specialness hit me by degrees — the earth-toned, narrow bar space, a glimpse at the bottle-lined, 10-cover private dining room out the back — before the thrilling descent into that clubby, rock svengali downstairs with its warm, house-inflected soundtrack.
The crowd was generally that internationalist Notting Hill set of the young, hot and mysteriously minted. As I waited for my friend Julian to arrive, one of my abiding memories is of the smartly dressed couple at the next table, nearing the end of their meal, and emitting the sort of involuntary pleasure-groans that make you feel like you’re intruding. It didn’t take long to understand that this response to Caia’s sharing plates was wholly appropriate.
Crispy chicken skin was far more presentationally delicate than it sounded: four translucent scrims of crackling, glossy as varnished autumn leaves, dotted with a preserved lemon and nori emulsion, and packing a scarcely believable whooshing rush of savoury animal fat. Dribbly soft duck egg, arrayed with pickled beetroot, explosively crisp chickpeas and charred quarter-moons of courgette, was a study in textural interplay and carefully channelled bonfire musk. Vigorously blackened “smokey potato” with mushed borlotti beans, roast garlic miso and a dusting of parmesan felt like cowboy food with an umami rocket lit underneath it. “Potatoes… and beans?” said Julian, swirling a mezcal-doused Caia negroni, not able to quite compute how something so humble had been rendered with such indulgent magnificence.
“Live fire cooking” is one of those terms that is used so frequently it barely registers as a concept or manifests in the food. But Donovan (who is Canadian-born and previously worked at The Pem) has a rare command and understanding of the language and subtleties of open smoke and flame. It is evident in a charred, spoonably tender hunk of pork belly beside an audacious pineapple salsa. It’s apparent in a dessert of charred peaches, still holding their tender firmness despite the bubbled, molasses-black char on their surface. And it is very much there in the monkfish — rare-cooked to perfect, snowy tenderness and set on an ambrosial miracle of a creamed, barbecued corn — that was prompting those near-orgasmic reactions from the other table.
This is a place with big plans (including DJ nights at weekends, when it stays open until 1am). All of this, though, is the support act for the infernal magic of Donovan’s food. That retro listening lounge may be Caia’s beating heart but the open kitchen, with its leaping flames and blazing creativity, is unquestionably the source of its firecracker soul.
