If you’re going to enjoy new season’s grouse anywhere, it has to be at Kitchen W8 – after all, Mark Kempson is the current Game Chef of the Year. There’s a lovely tradition among restaurants of racing to be the first to serve grouse the moment the season opens on the Glorious Twelfth, but we deliberately wait a few days. For us, it’s never about having the first birds; it’s about having the very best.

 

 If you’re not up to date with Instagram trends – and why should you be? – you might not know that there’s a real love for 1970s food. We don’t mean that chefs have discovered the unique charms of Findus Crispy Pancakes. Rather, they’re championing dishes that might once have been called naff.

It’s a reaction to food fashions, trends and snobbery. What’s wrong with prawn cocktail? It’s one of the most delicious things you can eat.  And if you’re in your twenties, it’s something to be discovered for the first time.

Our brilliant sous-chef, Chloe McCoy, is in her mid-twenties, so she didn’t live through the era of ham and pineapple the first time around. However, she’s a great aficionado of retro food and, for our next supper club, has designed a magnificently delicious menu featuring dishes full of nostalgia.

They will be cooked with all the skill and precision that made Chloe a MasterChef: The Professionals semi-finalist. And they definitely won’t look like the technicolour food images of the 1970s. The ingredients will be stellar – langoustines in her prawn cocktail, Iberico pork pressa in her Pork, Crackling and Stuffing – and the flavours will be sophisticated. Her Pina Colada (warm financier, coconut sorbet and rum-poached pineapple) will be more Kensington than Essex.

She’ll be cooking this fantastic menu at our next Supper Club on September 24th, so do come along and see what this talented new generation of chefs is making of classic retro dishes. It’s going to be tremendous fun – and a great excuse to get together with a group of fellow food lovers around the communal table in our private dining room.

If there is a thread running through the cooking at Kitchen W8, it is an obsession with purity of flavour. This is one of the reasons that Mark Kempson loves cooking game so much. 

It’s wild food, straight from heaths and moorlands where animals have roamed free and eaten naturally. Each game bird has its own distinctive flavour, as do venison and hare. And despite what some may think, it’s delicate and not too strong. That’s a misconception dating from the times when game was hung until it was literally ‘gamey’.

Mark has won multiple awards for his game cookery, including Game Chef of the Year. In his hands, a menu of wild food is a revelation with dishes of great invention and subtlety.

Our annual Celebration of Game Menu is an unmissable feast. It’s available for just two weeks this autumn from October 26th to November 8th. Don’t miss it.

Autumn is the height of the truffle season. As summer heat gives way to cold nights and rainfall, truffles buried deep under forest soil come to life. They grow in size and start to emit the extraordinary aroma that allows them to be detected. It’s one of those miracles of nature that deserves to be celebrated, which is just what we do every year with our annual truffle menu.

Using native autumn truffles from woodland in Wiltshire and black “Périgord” truffles Mark Kempson devises a series of dishes that can be enjoyed on their own or as part of a gloriously indulgent Truffle Tasting Menu. You can experiment with just a hint of truffle (Wiltshire Truffle and Baron Bigod Croquettes) enjoy a hand rolled pasta dish where truffle is the star of the show (you choose the variety) or opt for a classic French dish of Tornedos Rossini with Sauce Périgueux.

The truffle menu runs for just two weeks from November 23rd to December 6th. It’s one of the highlights of the Kitchen W8 year.