The room did not change. What changed was the name, the menu and the wine. Walk into Dove on Kensington Park Road and a regular of Orasay would swear that nothing had moved: the same wood and brick, the same look, even the same sommelier. Then the plates arrive, and the seafood restaurant has become somewhere you could happily eat a Tuesday dinner of fried lasagne, a very good sauce and a bowl of chips for mopping.
A pivot with a family tree
Jackson Boxer is the chef and restaurateur behind Brunswick House in Vauxhall, Henri in Covent Garden and the Soho dive bar Below Stone Nest, and he opened Orasay in 2019 to cook day-boat fish from around the UK. Dove, which opened on 7 January 2025, is his answer to what a neighbourhood restaurant should do next. He has not stopped cooking seafood, but he does not want to be defined by it. The brief, in his words, is whatever he feels like cooking and eating at the moment. When he eats out, he says, he wants dishes people love but cannot be faffed to make at home, the sauce that takes four days, the beautiful, complicated dessert.
The room
Dove calls itself a neighbourhood restaurant and the neighbourhood obliges. It sits in a small block of restaurants behind the Electric Cinema, along a row of Georgian houses, with simple wood and brick inside. At the back, a private dining room under a draped ceiling is the place for a birthday. Lunch runs from Thursday to Sunday, dinner from Tuesday to Saturday, and the larger mains are built for two, so bring someone who shares.
What to order
Start with the fried potato pizzette, topped with burrata, bonito and mortadella, already celebrated, and the deep-fried squares of Taleggio and Wiltshire truffle lasagne, easy to eat by the dozen. Black tomatoes with sour cream and chilli crisp were the winter vitamin hit. The ricotta dumplings started out in a lobster cream, rich and tilted towards Thai curry by lime leaf oil, and now arrive in a vodka sauce with Parmesan cream.
Mains reward the table that orders a sauce. The bavette comes with smoked bone marrow and morels, and the duck fat fries are there to mop up. The wood-roast half chicken with Café de Paris butter is reputedly a regular favourite, and the steamed hake in a Champagne sauce is the sort of rich, elaborate thing you want a kitchen to make for you. Then there is the burger, made from grass-fed beef dry-aged for 50 days, Gorgonzola and a Champagne onion lyonnaise. It is not on the menu and only a limited number are made each night, so FACT, arriving for an early dinner, found them already gone. Ask when you book.
Save room. Fior di latte soft serve swirled with early harvest olive oil, beside warm oatmeal biscuits, is a refined version of milk and cookies, and the coffee cardamom caramel cream is the other pudding to consider.
Drinks
The cocktail list is short, and the Walnut Old Fashioned, smoky and silky, is the one to order. The opening list held a dirty martini made with Sapling vodka and a Honey Margarita, and both remain. The wine list is compact but wide-ranging, with a Falanghina and a Gamay poured from kegs and, each week, an eccentric or rare bottle by the glass, handled by a sommelier who stayed on from Orasay days.
It says something about how London eats now that one of its best-regarded chefs answered a changing city by cooking precisely what he would like to be served. The room is the same. The reasons to book it are better.
- The vibe
- Relaxed Notting Hill neighbourhood room, wood and brick, made for sharing.
- The food
- Potato pizzette, fried Taleggio lasagne, ricotta dumplings, wood-roast chicken.
- The drink
- Walnut Old Fashioned, Honey Margarita, keg wines by the glass.
- A tip
- Mains suit two. Lunch runs Thursday to Sunday, and the burger is off menu.
