Neighbourhood gem: Carmel
(Picture: Matt Writtle)It was the flatbread that jerked me to attention. Before that, I had looked around at the lunchtime scene in Carmel — a new, Levant-inspired Queen’s Park spot from the Berber & Q team — and told myself I was in for a pleasant enough afternoon of familiar, Ottolenghian standards. But then it landed on the table: a glossy, puffed dome, heaped with zhoug-trickled wild mushrooms and manouri cheese, spotted with angry, oven-blackened bubbles and looking vaguely like a fire damaged blowfish. A slice went in my mouth — light and garlicky and creamy, with a long, lusciously complex sourdough finish — and I was rendered speechless.
Though it isn’t categorised as such, it may be some of the very best pizza in the city. And the unexpectedness of that gets to the heart of what makes this all-day operation — named after the Hebrew word for “vineyard”, opened late last year, and already ripening nicely under the guidance of NW6-based chef-owner Josh Katz — such a subtly potent, magical little endeavour.
A big part of this rests with its location. Tucked just round the corner from Queen’s Park station, Lonsdale Road is one of those alluring, soulful little discoveries that London can somehow still spew out: a long, cobbled mews, strung here and there with festoon lights, dotted with interesting new businesses, and crackling with the sort of organic buzz and coolness that I sense locals would probably like me to kindly shut the hell up about, lest loads of bridge-and-tunnellers from far-flung postcodes stream in to ruin everything.
I arrived a little late on a quietish Thursday to find my cousin Tenne at a window table with a couple of dishes already in front of him. But if I felt any irritation at him starting without me — and I definitely did — then it dissipated the moment we started eating. Cured sardines came drizzled with sour lemon verjus, and carefully ornamented with green chillies, a smear of sour cream, and gorgeous softened coins of ratte potato. Smoked carrot, beetroot and freekeh salad brought the requisite textural interplay. And there was za’atar flatbread, too. Bubbled and fragrant and served beside a tahini and fermented chilli dip that was a study in smooth, smartly muzzled ferocity. “This reminds me of places in Tel Aviv,” said Tenne, looking around approvingly at the modest lunchtime crowd, tucking into mussels escabeche and shared pans of shakshuka in the open, plant-fringed space. I would personally add the faintly industrial, airy brunch spots of Brooklyn and Berlin to that imagined moodboard.
One of the things that makes Carmel so effective is the rigour that’s always lurking beneath this presentational casualness and familiarity. The head-nodding house on the stereo gestures towards a party atmosphere without inducing tinnitus. Charred hispi cabbage arrives bearing blackened leaves and a rubbled fistful of XXL macadamia dukkah. And then, finally, if you are wise enough to pick it, there is the steady magnificence of slow-grilled urfa chilli and pomegranate molasses chicken: a moody, splayed Guernica of griddle-scorched poultry, piled aboard a moistmaker of gravy-soaked bread and building with each bite into a heady cocktail of smoke, acidity and bitterness.
Quite a showstopping way to end a meal. And, I’d say, certainly a better closing choice than the polenta and date upside down cake that is grainy, oversweet and ill-matched with its attendant ice cream, candied nuts and cumin caramel.
Still, as we stepped back out into the sunlit sparkle of Lonsdale Road, my abiding feeling was envy that, unlike Katz, I didn’t live closer. Carmel reinvigorates a perhaps overworked restaurant genre, crowns an emergent dining district and expands a beloved brand with real confidence, craft and cool. Yes, it is a self-consciously local, neighbourhood operation. But this is destination cooking with its own gravitational pull. And a reputation that is already ringing out, right across the city.
