Jimi Famurewa reviews Seven Dials Market: Prime real estate for a quick, generally delicious fix

A bit chilly: The 'massive foyer' seating space at Seven Dials Market

Jimi Famurewa @jimfam17 October 2019

Food: 3/5

Ambience: 3/5

I don’t know if it’s because I no longer commute to central London — my office mates now tend to be either the cat, lavishly licking himself clean, or a mother and baby singing group belting out ‘Wheels on the Bus’ in a draughty local library — but excursions into the West End can feel especially strange.

There seems, every time I’m there, to be a new business that I don’t fully understand. A gigantic, dimly lit e-sports café, say. Or one of those adult ball pit bars that tend to make me feel like a recently roused coma patient.

And so, having doddered past all this on a recent rain-slicked Wednesday evening, there was something additionally disorientating about walking into Seven Dials Market. This, of course, is the Kerb street food collective’s capacious new permanent mothership in Covent Garden. And though I am usually very into the messy clatter of these places, two of my friends and I briefly fell into a sort of tight-smiled silence as we ventured down to a pink-daubed main eating area that somehow managed to be both noisily busy and atmospherically hollow.

‘It feels like we’re in a massive foyer,’ said my mate John, as we squashed on to communal benches. He was not wrong. And though there are important caveats (having nipped in on another occasion, lunchtimes seem to have a livelier, looser vibe), I came away a little unsettled by a vibe that was strained and a bit chilly.

Here’s the twist, though: the food we ordered was mostly good and, occasionally, terrific. Whitebait from Ink arrived as a pile of fryer-puffed, golden mini Zeppelins coated in pungent, spiced seaweed salt. El Pollote’s guava-glazed fried chicken was an even sharper knockout: flavoursome, dramatically cragged poultry beneath an unruly Pollock painting of sauce and sprinkled dried chilli, ably abetted by bronzed, forcefully crisp yuca (or cassava) fries.

Stop and slurp: Brixton-hailing ramen master Nanban is one of the many traders at Seven Dials Market

Chiang Mai sausage ‘bao wow’ from Yum Bun — essentially an intricately spiced, tamarind-laced northern Thai hot dog — brought a similarly effective helter-skelter of sweetness and heat. And, to me, it seemed to cohere a little better than the same trader’s snack of Sichuan aubergine and bubbled wonton crisps with a cold spill of slightly cloying, whipped tofu. This being 2019, there was fresh pasta as well: twizzles of strozzapreti in four-cheese ‘fonduta’ sauce, and hefty fan belts of pappardelle with liver-thickened wild rabbit ragu. Made by a Franco Manca spin off (also called Strozzapreti), they both packed nuance, punch and maximum comfort.

Even the disappointment of some sprinkle-flecked doughnut holes from Big Shot (the sort of sickly, dense thing you might benevolently purchase at a school bake sale) couldn’t fully dampen the joys that had come before it. We made our way up and out through a drastically thinned crowd, agreeing we were too stuffed to make good on early plans to conclude the night at Pick & Cheese (the fun-looking, lightly hyped conveyor belt cheese restaurant).

Places like Seven Dials Market, Centre Point’s Arcade Food Theatre and the forthcoming Market Halls West End are not perfect. But they also aren’t the cynical, soulless harbingers of a coming restaurant apocalypse. They are vast, high-grade canteens that offer small operations prime real estate, and harried Londoners a quick, generally delicious fix. I don’t think I’d build another evening around a trip. But I can see myself returning to open my laptop and cram in a Monty’s Deli reuben. Or to slurp some Nanban ramen before a show at the Donmar. Here, in the vicinity of the West End’s more perplexing, garish distractions, that’s an innovation I can both comprehend and very much get behind.