#IR3: One Restaurant, Two Reviews, Eight Years

Welcome to the third edition of In Review

Baroo’s new logo

The third edition of In Review brings a first foray into restaurant writing outside the U.K. Bill Addison is a critic I’ve long admired from a sort of distant adjacency, having not quite crossed paths with him at Eater before he moved to the Los Angeles Times. This week, he is reviewing Baroo, the evolution of Kwang Uh’s seminal modern Korean restaurant, and on a quiet week for the U.K. critics — aside from one getting very upset that chefs don’t brand each other as much these days — we’re taking a trip to California to put Addison’s two reviews in dialogue with each other.

In Review is the paid subscriber section of In Digestion, but the introduction and first piece of the week will always be above the paywall.

If you are an existing paid subscriber who signed up due to the interviews, and don’t find this appealing, that’s all good. Please get in touch and I will sort you out.

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Jimi Famurewa | The Evening Standard

Kebhouze, London (Zone 1)

The first one-star pan of 2024 is Kebhouze, three storeys of kebab cynicism on Oxford Street. As with his raves, Famurewa’s love of balancing adjectives and adverbs on top of each other in sentences like Jenga towers suits this mode, successfully emulating the feel of “a cluster-headache of cherry-red corrugated metal, throbbing neon signage, and hip hop cranked to sternum-juddering volume” with his style.

Less convincing is the diagnosis that Kebhouze embodies “the decidedly “this’ll do” future of mainstream, TikTok-age dining.” The brand’s TikTok presence in the U.K. is both weak and bad, much like most of dishes that appear on Famurewa’s table. Kebhouze’s true lineage is the string of international landgrabs in London occasioned not by social media, but by a property vacuum opened up by Brexit and COVID-19, willingly filled by international groups from Europe and the U.S.A. across all price points.

It ranges from what he accurately calls “the fast-casual heart of darkness” (Kebhouze, Happy, Popeyes, Wendy’s) to fine dining (whatever expensively outfitted Italian Riviera restaurant with ownership in the U.A.E. or U.S.A. of which you care to think.) Someone has to help Gordon Ramsay in his one-man mission to take over every failed fast-casual burger chain with another fast-casual burger chain, after all.

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After the paywall:

• Why one critic is gutted that chefs aren’t bullying each other anymore

• How two reviews, eight years apart, tell the story of a restaurant’s evolution

• Looking forward to a new monthly item for In Review