Smoking Goat founder Ben Chapman is to open Kiln in Soho on September 30th.
Kiln will be a side-of-the-road-type restaurant, with a short grill menu plus a speciality daily noodle dish. The cooking is inspired by the rural simplicity of the Thai borderlands where dishes combining Burmese and Yunanese spicing and flavours are cooked over open fire.
Kiln’s menu is based around simple, quick grill dishes, many of which will be cooked on a wood burning kiln oven and grills designed by Ben. As well as looking to Thailand for inspiration, much of the menu has been created around the best British produce available.
The kitchen will work from whole animals bred specifically for the restaurant, the fruition of working a year ahead with talented growers and farmers to make a menu hand in hand with the ingredients.
“Many of Kiln’s recipes have been developed whilst travelling with the team in the Northern Thai regions, particularly the villages near the Myanmar border where the Chinese influence is most prevalent,” says Ben Chapman.
“As with Smoking Goat our aim with Kiln isn’t to replicate these dishes in London, however, but to base what we do around the most flavourful, well sourced ingredients we can get here rather than import.”
As well as creating the menu, Ben has designed and built Kiln’s interiors together with longstanding woodwork collaborator Dan Preston. The restaurant will be a functional, simple space and will feature high stools sat at a long stainless steel counter that curves around the length of the room. The counter will sit in front of an open kitchen where guests can watch chefs preparing and cooking dishes around the kitchen’s centrepiece, the wood burning Kiln.
