:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/57133129/Chef.0.jpeg)
A new all-day dining restaurant, with a kitchen led by a chef who worked at Momofuku in New York and Dinner by Heston Blumenthal in London, will open in Notting Hill in this month next month. 184 Green and Grill will open at 184 Kensington Park Road, adding to an atypical number of new and notable restaurant openings in west London this year.
As well as entering a burgeoning restaurant neighbourhood, and serving throughout the day, the restaurant will adopt three other voguish modern restaurant tropes: sharing plates; a focus on “cutting-edge” plant-based dishes “that will hold their own on the menu, not as an afterthought;” and wood-fired robata-grilled meat and fish.
Newly-appointed head chef Peter Tonge grew up in Canada and has worked at both Tom Aikens and Dinner by Heston Blumenthal in London; he moves to 184 from Jamie Oliver’s Barbecoa, where he “gained expert grill experience.” The chef is also a former vegetarian who “has extensive knowledge and love for plant-based cooking.” As well as cooking as an executive sous chef at David Chang’s cult NYC restaurant, Momofuku, the chef also worked under Neil Perry at Rockpool in Sydney.
"We are in the vanguard of flexitarian dining,” co-owner Alex Giri said in a statement. “If you go out to eat with four or five friends, work colleagues or family the chances are one person will want a steak but someone else will be vegetarian. This is food for modern diners. We want to create a restaurant where everyone around the table will feel looked after.” Giri, whose brother and sister-in-law were private chefs to The Rolling Stones, is launching the restaurant with her son, Oscar Harris.
The 80-cover restaurant will sit across two floors; its name is a play on the legendary celebrity-magnet 192, once a few doors down on the same street, which in the 90s, saw Alastair Little, Rowley Leigh and Rose Gray at the helm. The operators say that while it was touch and go back then, “184 is opening in a very different era where the restaurant business is dominated by chains and backed by city money. We hope to bring some individuality back to the eating out experience, so that customers feel well-fed but also appreciated and looked after.”
