One of the things that restaurant owners invariably find most annoying about critics — and we cannot do the full, unabridged list as we would literally be here all day — is that we visit too early. That, blinded by our manic desire to be first, we show up and paw at the glass like cats, desperate to be let in to pass judgment on something that isn’t quite ready. My rejoinder to this has always been that it is really an issue about the ceding of control as much as journalistic impatience; that, really, the “right time” to visit for most chefs will be some amorphous, faraway point in the future that’s specifically dictated by them.
However, I am willing to now accept that in the case of Chet’s — LA-based, Thai-American chef Kris Yenbamroong’s collaborative comfort food concept with Ennismore hotels — I almost certainly jumped the critical gun. Visiting last summer, when it debuted, amid sweltering end-times temperatures, as a four-month residency in the basement of The Hoxton in Holborn, my broad sense was of a fitfully effective, lightly confusing work in progress. But now it is time for me to eat crow. Because here is Yenbamroong’s creation as it was initially conceived: a huge, intricately wrought, all-day operation within The Hoxton’s new Shepherd’s Bush hotel — and it is truly a thing of screaming, irrepressible brilliance that prospers because it understands that US diner culture is about maximalist abundance of spirit as much as portions. I absolutely get it now. And I have scarcely been so happy to be reminded that first or even second impressions can count for nothing.
