Honey & Co, London WC1: “Largeness scented with orange blossom” – restaurant review | Grace Tooth

Uprooting a London institution is no mean feat. Despite only living on Warren Street for 10 years - a nod in London's history - Honey & Co has slipped into the hearts of many foodies, largely because of its laid-back sparkle and always friendly. It wasn't a shiny "smart jacket and longtime reservation" type of thing. You could show up at Sarit Packer and Itamar Srulovich's little Middle Eastern restaurant any Tuesday at brunch time and they'd try to rush you for rolls of green shakshuka and merguez sausage. Or for a few rounds of sabich (roasted eggplant coated in fresh pitta). Sarit grew up in northern Israel; Itamar was born in Jerusalem. Sarit at one point led the pastry teams at Ottolenghi's restaurants, while Itamar was head chef at the Notting Hill and Belgravia branches. Honey & Co was their fledgling solo project and London eagerly took part in the couple's dinnertime meze feasts. My memories are of damp London nights mopping up hummus made with fresh broad beans and labneh with ramson leaf, or eating feta cheese seasoned with paprika.

The devil of Honey & Co was in the details: it wasn't just falafel; they were fresh falafel on a seasoned tahini tablecloth with a fragrant Lebanese cucumber salad, and the chicken shish came with leafy freekeh and a lush pea and herb salad. Eating far more than expected was de rigueur, due to an unquantifiable orange blossom-scented bounty in the ambiance that prompted customers to order the feta and honey cheesecake. This is where high-fat Philadelphia meets double cream, icing sugar and feta and sits heroically on a nest of kadaïf pastry.

When Honey & Co Warren Street announced its closure there was a lot of meowing from fans, well that a plan was quickly put into place to reopen in an alternative Bloomsbury home on Lamb's Conduit Street, just opposite the wonderful Noble Rot - a name all readers should have hidden away for a special occasion. and Noble Rot being within a blink of an eye of each other, that seems perfectly fine, they are both restaurants that have quietly become mainstays of the London food scene. was going for my first dinner at the brand new Honey & Co, a little cooler and prettier, I had concerns. You can't just "move" a restaurant. The magic lies in a plethora of little things other than the food: the acoustics, the convergence of tables, the sounds of traffic, the location of the toilets, too much or not enough cooking smell, and so on. The owners can change places and serve the same dishes on the same plates, but the spell is somehow broken.

I shouldn't have worried because by a warm July evening - the kind of weather...