The Kingston Arms - hummus, wine, and a good time
"Kitchen. Hummus. Wine." proclaims the website of the reopened Kingston Arms, in a masterstroke of explaining without explaining. Weirdly, I get it. One of the menu items is simply "things on toast", which I get a little less, and leaves me wondering if one of the proprietors had a bitter breakup with an information architect. Regardless, they have an excellent relationship with food - our lunch was a delight.
What the menu actually offers is a small selection of Levantine sharing plates and an extremely thorough list of wines.
We opted for chorizo, hummus, pita, some pickles, and those mysterious "things" on toast. The things, as it happened, were salmon, smoked sardines, and octopus salad, all topping plump, lightly toasted challah bread. Sometimes, as Neil Gaiman observes in Sandman the mystery is more compelling that the secret. Not this time. Order the things on toast.
The chorizo was buttery and rich and smoky and vinous, and arrived with surprise bruschetta that turned it into a fuller portion that we'd expected. In fact, we ended up with more food than we could manage, which was a pity because I'd very much like to have managed. The tomatoes were chopped almost to a paste and dressed simply on soft, yielding challah. It offset the richness of the chorizo perfectly.
The unhelpfully cryptic menu
This spirit of picking tasty ingredients and letting them shine - with a few bright contrast points - carried on through. The smoked sardines were punchy enough that I initially mistook them for anchovies and dressed with counterpointing blasts of garlic. Ok, I'm overdoing it there, but I really enjoyed those sardines. The minced octopus was no poor cousin either - meaty and complex with a hint of sweetness, and they'd sourced some beautifully smoky salmon for the final piece of the dish.
Now let's talk hummus: it's great here.
This one was smooth and silken. Light, with enough tahini texture to gesture at that peanut-butter-on-the-teeth feeling without being at all overpowering. It came with pillowy fresh pita, and in quantity. Next time we're getting the half portion. Seriously, they are not mucking about. You're getting great hummus, and you're getting a lot.
The things, on toast.
In fact, I think I could pass a very happy evening here working down the wine list with a dish of hummus and a few friends to help me with it. Probably some chorizo too, and who knows, perhaps whatever "The Jackson Five" turns out to be.
Maybe it's oysters? I saw a platter of them being brought out looking elegant on a bed of crushed ice and felt a brief pang that I don't like them. It's one of my flashes of culinary philistinism. But people I trust tell me they're done well here. They're also occasionally done for a quid each as a special, which is not to be sneezed at.
Honestly, my only beef with The Kingston Arms (well, this iteration of it, anyway - see below) is the menu copy. Sure, you can ask the staff what things are, and they’ll be lovely about it and tell you, and you’ll get a great meal. But should you have to? If we’re doing market-fresh rotations, there’s the good old fashioned design pattern of “see blackboard”, if we’re just posturing, well, that’s not exactly friendly.
Then there’s dietary issues. Again, you can ask, but it feels glitchy, shifts the onus. Read the menu, choose what appeals, order food - it’s a pretty fluent pattern, the standard flow. Change it if you’re adding something, sure. Is this?
Look, I’m a tired neurotic millennial. Sometimes I want dinner to be an “experience”, but mostly I want it not to have a needless cognitive load. The food here is excellent, I’d love it if the menu were too.
But that shouldn’t sour the recommendation. I loved the meal we had, and will absolutely be going back. I think if you go, you’ll love it too. Remember the portions are substantial, and order the hummus.
But Roger, didn't you say you'd never set foot in the Kingston Arms again?
Well, sure. Ship of Theseus, innit.
The previous incarnation was a solid ale pub with even more solid food. It was a favourite until a reprehensible customer service incident pushed it onto my shitlist for a clear decade, and indeed until it closed in 2020. Ten years is a long time to stay mad at someone, but I'm a fussy old queen and "reasonable" is praxis not intuition. What's replaced it shares a name, some bricks, a little furniture, and even I'm not petty enough to carry on sulking at that. Also, it's fucking awesome.