Well, I’m still full. That’s the first thing to know. -Probably will be at the time you read this too. It’s 16 hours since I finished dinner at Kid, and I think I might be ready to eat again at dinner tomorrow.
So was it worth it? I’m writing this more quickly after the meal than usual. Why the rush? This is because, for one time only, I wanted to be the FIRST critic to review a HOT NEW OPENING. There was nothing in the papers last week, so I think I’ve done it… although the Times puts Giles Coren online on a Wednesday, and as I have to write on Tuesday, I don’t know yet. It’s an utterly pointless thing to strive for, but you’ve got to show commitment.
The kid (£65) was described as ‘for two’: they should have added ‘football teams’
There’s an old joke that Fay Maschler, the Standard’s former critic, used to review so quickly that she was basically in the building site wearing a hard hat, asking if they had a few dishes to send out. Now, however, the critics have no chance of being first. By the time I got to Kid, on the second Monday of opening, I already knew what most of the dishes looked like from Instagram. The PRs, the influencers, they’d all been in, and they’d already become jaded with Kid jokes. The restaurant is named after the kid goat, its ‘hero dish’, and the PRs have done a lot of ‘new Kid on the block’ headlines. One writer said it was inevitable that the national reviews would include a ‘Here’s looking at you, Kid’ pun. Well, as we were scraping the goat meat off the bone, I thought that I might contribute ‘kiddy fiddling’, but something tells me that won’t catch on.
