You know what’s better than turning up to a restaurant to find a bustling bar, packed with beautiful people deep in animated conversation? Turning up to a restaurant where all that is going on behind two floor-to-ceiling velvet curtains. The anticipation! It’s like when you were five years old, putting your ear to one of the presents under the tree to see if you could make out what it was. Well, get giddy again, because that’s what greets you at the New York-style Italian restaurant on Mayfair’s Dover Street, aptly named The Dover. It’s the brainchild of former Soho House chief Martin Kuczmarski and it’s said to be inspired by the legendary Italian movie siren Sophia Loren. Certainly, Ms Loren would appreciate the languid wall-to-wall wooden curvature in the intimate dining room, its sexy parabolas emphasised by pockets of warm amber lighting.
The restaurant will celebrate its first birthday in January, and what a year it must have been because it’s still pretty difficult to snaffle a table. It’s tough enough to find the place itself, with its plain glass front and nothing-door doing a great job of camouflage. But let’s get back behind those velvet curtains. What’s really refreshing about The Dover is the lack of pomp. There’s no standing on ceremony, or tiptoeing around tables, you’re right in the thick of it. You’re escorted to the bar through a narrow channel, swarthy Italian barmen on one side, and London’s glitterati deep in voluminous conversation on the other. It’s cosy, busy and just the right amount of noisy – a New York speakeasy at its best, with attentive staff saying all the right things.
The dining room is further down the dark throat of the building, opening up into a small gullet of tables, set out in that unique configuration that allows privacy while also permitting a good gawp at who else is in there (Tracey Thorn from musical duo Everything but the Girl when this writer dropped in). The menu is delightfully normal. No periodic table of foams or reductions, just perfectly cooked Italian classics such as fillets of branzino, parmigiana americanata, prawn cocktail, beef tartare and lobster ravioli. The food is by no means a side show, but it’s not the type of fare that requires you to kneel and genuflect at the altar of culinary wankery. I had the house cheesecake for dessert, and it was everything it promised to be – unctuous and immensely comforting.
The iconic restaurants of New York in the 1970s and ’80s were able to strike the perfect balance between great food and a party-like ambience because their clientele all came for the same reason – to eat well, drink too much and leave having had the pleasure of dining on some outrageous gossip. The Dover is perhaps the only restaurant in London that comes close to recreating that scene. Drink it in while you can.
33 Dover Street, London W1S 4NF; thedoverrestaurant.com
Ryan Thompson is a UK-based menswear and lifestyle writer, whose work has appeared in, among others, the Financial Times, Mr Porter, The Rake and Ape to Gentleman
