Don’t Tell Dad: ‘It’s a class act’ – restaurant review

Don’t Tell Dad, 10-14 Lonsdale Road, London NW6 6RD. Snacks and small plates £5-£14, large plates £18-£29, desserts £9, wines from £36

Don’t Tell Dad in London’s Queen’s Park is a self-declared neighbourhood restaurant in a knowingly dishevelled neighbourhood. It sits on a part-cobbled, mews-style lane which was once home to stable blocks and very much looks like it. If you want to snoop at the red-rust frontage on Google Street View, however, you can’t. It’s a private street, through which Google’s cars may never pass. Lonsdale Road, once the property of the Church Commissioners, is now owned by a single landlord, Feldberg Capital, which is gently turning it into an ever-so-random-on-purpose leisure destination. Josh Katz’s Middle Eastern-influenced grill restaurant Carmel is here, as is the Australian-inspired Milk Beach and an outpost of Pizza Pilgrims, alongside a micro-brewery, a yoga studio, co-working spaces and a macrobiotic deli where they crochet their own fermented sea-vegetables. Perhaps I made the last one up.

This reads like an eye-roll at the tastes of the infuriating, lotus-eating middle classes and the sort of businesses which pander to them. As I’m one of those infuriating people, I’m basically rolling my eyes at myself. Lonsdale Road has a lovely, rackety Copenhagen vibe and I would be thrilled if it were part of my neighbourhood. By day, Don’t Tell Dad is a bakery serving brown butter hazelnut croissant, and pear and whisky Danish, by head baker Keren Sternberg, formerly of Layla. By night it is a restaurant serving many other things. It fits in here perfectly.

The restaurant was founded by local Daniel Land, the former banker behind quick-service pasta chain Coco di Mama, and is named in memory of his sister Lesley, who died suddenly not long ago. As a child, Lesley was always good for skulduggery of which their parents should know nothing. She came up with plans and urged her brother not to tell dad. It’s a sweet back story to a restaurant of innocent if serious pleasures; the kind only the most puritanical of fathers could find it in themselves to disapprove of. Anywhere which braises oxtail down until it is a sticky mess of uber-gravy-slicked meaty threads, tops a heap of it with dripping-fried breadcrumbs, and then puts all of that on a small crumpet and calls it a snack, is fine by me.

A few years ago, perhaps pre-Covid, a restaurant like this in London would most likely have been found in what my kids call Central and I call the West End. (Sidebar: when did this change? How dare the young people come up with a name which makes so much more sense?) But the gravitational pull of the capital has shifted, from the middle to a little further out. Why drag into town if it can be avoided? It has the feel of somewhere you might stumble into and then out of again. There’s an open kitchen, soft lighting, cosy banquettes and booths, and a beautiful tiled floor, all of it picking up the colours from outside, as if bathing you in the glow of a guttering hearth. The orange ducted ceiling is, like the music, low (gentle club beats in the dining room; showtunes by the loos). Try to get a table, rather than a seat at a counter. The curve-backed stools look comfortable, but aren’t quite. No worries. An oxtail crumpet will quickly soothe the wriggling.

Head chef Luke Frankie, formerly of Noble Rot and the Drapers Arms, has written a menu I’m going to call Cosmopolitan English: these are dishes which are both rooted very much in the here, but also reference over there. Among the small plates there’s an impressively deep-filled crab tart of white and brown meat in a thin, flaky pastry shell, spun through with green herbs, which tastes like something straight out of Jane Grigson’s cookbook English Food. But there is also a shuddering cairn of fritto misto which, with its inflated, glowing batter, is more Tokyo tempura than Italian antipasto. This one is announced as a fritto misto of winter vegetables, so you can feel good about your life choices, while celebrating the delicate art of deep-fat frying. There may have been slivers of squash and torn cabbage leaves hiding under the carapace. Who cares? It comes dribbled with a little honey, and dusted with chilli flakes. Abandon cutlery. This is work for fingers.

As a foil against the fried goods, order the panzanella of impeccable, taut-skinned tomatoes with torn pieces of their own dense sourdough to soak up the dressing, topped with snowy fleshed fillets of fried sardine. It’s a summer afternoon on the beach, here amid a London winter. After which Don’t Tell Dad stops being one of those small-plates restaurants you’ve started whining to your tolerant friends about, and just serves up plates of dinner. A piece of sea bass, cooked so the bronze sear has edged deeper into the fillet, lies on a textured purée of nutty Jerusalem artichokes.

Or there’s what amounts to the whole of a thumping mallard, complete with shot, for an extremely keen £28: both legs, slow-cooked then crisped, and both breasts, spiced, roasted and rested. Cooking wild duck like this isn’t something to which you can turn your hand. It takes experience to make sure it doesn’t tense up as it cooks, like a Mastermind contestant in the black chair. The skin is dark and rendered, and there’s a sweet carrot and date purée which is the ideal foil to the gamey meat. For salt there are bacon lardons. For greens there’s kale. Like the crab tart, there is something very English about it, a pleasing whiff of damp field and meadow under glowering skies.

For dessert they offer madeleines. Make sure to leave time because, just as at St John where I first came across this proposition, they will be baked to order. I watch the tray being slipped into the oven. They arrive 10 minutes later, hot and crisp-edged, with a little orange cream to drag them through. The wine list by Bert Blaize, author of the book Which Wine When, is concise, big on bottles by small producers and has a good choice by the glass and 500ml carafe. Have one each. Daniel Land, responsible for feeding a lot of City workers, has talked effusively about now wanting to create something for where he lives: an adaptable space that changes through the day. The result may not always be cheap. It may feel like a neighbourhood restaurant for well-heeled neighbours. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a class act. Trust me, this is one you can mention to your dad, and anyone else for that matter.

News bites

The big news in the London restaurant world this week is the announcement that cult Leytonstone Thai restaurant Singburi will end its recent sabbatical by reopening in Shoreditch. The new venture, which has been described as Singburi 2.0, is a joint enterprise by head chef Sirichai Kularbwong (son of the original founders who have now retired), Nick Molyviatis of Kiln and Oma, and Alexander Gkikas of Catalyst. The new incarnation will open later in the spring.

Meanwhile Shaun Moffat, formerly of Manteca in Shoreditch, and more recently of the Edinburgh Castle in Manchester’s Ancoats and then Maya, is staying in the city to open a restaurant called Winsome on Princess Street. It will, he says, serve ‘thoughtful British cooking’. He’ll be joined in the business by Owain Williams, one of the team behind Liverpool’s Belzan and more recently Medlock Canteen.

The Midland Grand Dining Room at the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel, formerly the Gilbert Scott, is being taken over by Victor Garvey of Sola in Soho. ‘A dining room of this stature deserves a menu that matches its grandeur,’ Garvey has said, describing his plans for the room as ‘Old world, new ideas, to honour the foundations of classical French cuisine while embracing modernity.’ The opening menu includes tuna with white peach, duck with boudin noir and calvados apples, and guinea fowl with Armagnac prunes. Three courses will cost £75 and it opens on 25 February (midlandgranddiningroom.com).

Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Instagram @jayrayner1