Chef Eran Tibi won me over almost at first bite when, several years ago, I tried out his initial restaurant, Bala Baya in Southwark, and troughed down everything in front of me in a piggy bliss. In this instance, I’m not what you’d call a tough crowd.
That said, my expectations for Tibi’s second place were high, and the new Soho restaurant surpassed them.
Tel Aviv-style Kapara is a sexy venue. It’s not as thirsty as its Instagram account might suggest, but the sultry restaurant comes with an aura of breezy, playful hedonism, which is absolutely fine by me.
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It’s also another clubby restaurant for London. It’s more laidback and less intense than some of the others around, but with its music up, seating plush and low and the cocktails punchy, Kapara has a vibe, and it is fun.
It takes its design cues from the rooftop bars found in the Mediterranean city, and it’s the trifecta of lit up arches encasing greenery and back-lit bottles of booze, as well as the tiled floor and warm pops of colour that gives the restaurant its warm weather twang.
In fact, if you could wrap up Tel Aviv’s seductive warmth and somehow dump it in the middle of grey old wintery London and do so so it works, that’s what Kapara has done.
Inuendo and cheek start at the front door. On entering, it asks you to push it hard (informative and useful to know) and requests you to pull gently (oh, behave) when leaving, and carries through to the menu (‘What all day foreplay dishes does the waitress recommend?’) and on to the downstairs bathroom tiles, which, surprisingly, were the second set of penis tiles I saw in the space of two days.
While some dishes were just very good, most of the dishes were phenomenal. Although the prawn baklava – a mind bending concept - can also be found in Bala Baya, it had until now escaped my attention.
The creamy crustaceans, grilled with the shell on and wrapped in crunchy pastry threads and glazed with pistachio, honey and rose, sent my neurons haywire in the way something utterly new and divine will do.
The squdgy mound of smoky-burnt aubergine had a similar effect. It came with a muddle of pine-nut jam, tahini and clementine marmalade piled on top and sliding down the side, and it was a revelation.
Even if you thought there was nothing more to be done to dress up hummus, a bowlful of the stuff came out dense and creamy, and warmed - warm! - up with sweet, caramelised onions and blitzed eggplant which was mopped up into non-existence by freshly baked pittas lightly dusty with flour.
Our plate of chunky black bream ceviche, made to be smeared through a bright green puddle of granny smith apple and lemon verbena sauce, was delicate and crisp, but perhaps slightly dwarfed alongside these lime-light hogging plates of big flavours.
For dessert, we shared an inventive, almost savoury, riff on a mille-feuille, which came out a huge and dramatic mess of black sesame crisps layered between thick dollops of black tahini and yoghurt, drizzled with a healthy dose of a tart morello cherry coulis and sprinkled with pink petals, which we also gobbled up into oblivion.
If you like semi-smutty puns and robust herbaceous cocktails, Kapara’s selection will do you fine. With an ingredients list littered with the likes of sumac, cardamom, hibiscus and yuzu, you’ll find something new and zingy. We went for two of The Glory Moles, by the way.
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Alternatively, the compact list of gazoz, old school Israeli-style sodas infused with the likes of lavender, rose and coriander, are so fresh you could drink them all day and our wine, a red Israeli number plucked from a list flecked with organic, vegan and low intervention options, was ‘totally quaffable’ according to my pal who papped the bottle’s label while muttering, ‘I need to get me a case’.
Like the food it serves, Kapara is a heady mix of ingredients that comes together to create something that gratifies and sates, and I can’t wait to go back.
Address: James Court, Manette Street W1D 4AL
Website: kapara.co.uk
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