A Capital Lunch For All Occasions at Twenty8 NoMad, London
It is no secret that the iK team love their food and seemingly any excuse to pop out for a team lunch. There are occasions however, when a team lunch transcends the merely functional and becomes something rather more memorable. When the room is right, the drinks are considered and the food arrives with enough ambition (and personal attention) to justify extra extravagance. Our recent descent on Twenty8 NoMad was precisely one of those occasions. What was scheduled as a much needed day out working lunch became, somewhere around the second round of cocktails, considerably much more. BY SAMANTHA READY
The NoMad London occupies one of the most storied addresses in the capital: 28 Bow Street, a building whose walls have witnessed rather more than most. This was, for the better part of two centuries, the Bow Street Magistrates’ Court and Police Station – the very place that processed Oscar Wild, the Kray twins and once briefly held Augusto Pinochet… If only those walls could talk. The building closed as a court in 2006, and when the NoMad hotel group – the New York hospitality powerhouse behind some of Manhattan’s most covetable addresses – chose it for their first international outpost in 2021, it felt both audacious and entirely right. The numbers align with pleasing neatness: NoMad New York lived on 28th Street; the London hotel sits at number 28. Twenty8 NoMad, then, was always an inevitability.
The restaurant occupies what was once the building’s central atrium, and it is – I’ll say it plainly – one of the most commanding dining rooms in the capital. Not beautiful in the hushed reverential sense, but alive in a way that makes you sit up straighter the moment you enter. Soaring Victorian ceilings rise above encircling balconies with their original ornate ironwork, the whole space shifting with a quality of light that shifts dramatically depending on the hour and season. Where the original hotel restaurant played it relatively safe – paler tones, a cautious kind of elegance – Martin Brudnizki Design Studio’s reimagining has introduced genuine personality: deep forest greens, burnished brass fittings, rattan, marble and leather that’s been broken in rather than merely expensive, and a collection of antiques and artworks that feel genuinely gathered rather than curated to a brief. There’s something of a grand Southern house about it – whitewashed pillars, palm fronds dancing in the light – crossed with the particular confidence of a Manhattan brasserie that’s never needed to prove itself.
In fact every inch of the spaces we explored, from the sleek polished bar with its high stools and ingenious signature serves including the Oaxacan Old Fashioned that generated the most animated table discussion (in place of bourbon, a considered marriage of mezcal and tequila carries the familiar architecture of the classic while introducing a smoky, mineral earthiness that belongs to the volcanic soils of southern Mexico) to the simply incredible toilets that follow the footprint of the cells reimagined into boudoir territory, were design masterpieces in their own right.
The kitchen operates under culinary director Bryce Shuman, whose formative years at Eleven Madison Park and subsequent Michelin star at his own Betony in New York represent rather impressive credentials. Day-to-day, the stoves – including the most impressive wood-fired grill that dominates one end of the dining space and is fired up daily for evening service – are led by executive chef Zak Gregoire, and between them they’ve crafted a menu that resists easy categorisation – Italian in places, American brasserie in others, with a consistent thread of quality and sourcing running through everything. The concept positions itself somewhere between New York nostalgia and French brasserie confidence, which sounds contradictory but in practice was entirely cohesive.
We ate, as any sensible group should when faced with a menu of this range, in the spirit of enthusiastic sharing – dishes arriving in a procession that revealed the kitchen’s breadth with impressive ease and led the team across familiar favourites while daring some to try new flavours.
The raw farm vegetables set the tone with admirable conviction; a reminder that great produce, presented without interference, requires nothing more than something excellent alongside it for dipping. Vivid, seasonal, properly crunchy. The mushroom flatbread with fresh mozzarella and picked onions was the first dish to generate genuine silence at the table as hands reached in all directions to enjoy the pillowy soft dough with the right about of char which carried the earthiness of the mushrooms, the yielding stretch of the melted cheese all cut through with vinegary precision of the picked onions.
The first to admit that I’m not often excited by ‘the salad’, the kale salad with pears, Pevensey Blue and sourdough crisps was a genuinely clever dish. Something of a quiet statement of intent, the excellent and undersung Sussex blue cheese brought a gentle grassy funk that found perfect counterpoint in the sweetness of ripe pear, while the crisp provided textural punctuation. That a restaurant so thoroughly steeped in New York confidence should be celebrating the dairy of our Sussex neighbour felt quietly charming, and we were rather pleased about it.
The prawn cocktail deserves a paragraph of its own, if only because it arrived without apology or irony. Great, properly pink, properly sweet prawns of a size and quality that reminded you what this dish has never gone away lay placed on its slate accompanied by the simplest of dressings, executed with the confidence of a kitchen team that knows their produce and why it works. Yet, it was followed by the chicken Milanese which promptly stole attention: the crisp crumb offset with bright lemon caper vinaigrette and the bitterness of chicory. Though perhaps proving that sometimes it’s the simplest that wins out, the cacio e pepe proved the dish of the afternoon. Ribbons of fresh pasta, silken and yielding, arrived coated in a sauce of such creamy, peppery depth that the table grinned in collective appreciation. Crowned with confit egg yolk that collapsed slowly at the touch of the first fork, it elevated the richness of the dish to new levels. Rome would have approved.
Dessert – the house tiramisu – closed proceedings with a considered confidence of a restaurant that knows how to end a meal. Properly coffee-soaked, properly mascarpone-rich, with a generous cocoa dusting, it was the little details of being served in individual cut glass dishes that reminded us (again) that this was no ordinary lunch stop.
Twenty8 NoMad is that increasingly rare proposition: a hotel restaurant that earns its place on the list through proper merit rather than geographical convenience. The room alone rewards a visit, but Shuman and Gregoire have ensured that what arrives, from both kitchen and bar, justifies the billing entirely.
As team lunches go, it has set a precedent that will prove difficult to follow.
hilton.com/en/hotels/lonnmnd-nomad-london/dining/twenty8-nomad
