Fancy dinner at Dabbous? That’ll be February 2013, madam

When the Standard’s food critic Fay Maschler awarded a rare five stars to Ollie Dabbous’s first venture she transformed the chef’s fortunes. Joshi Herrmann on a gastronomic revolution

Magic fingers: Ollie Dabbous, head chef of the eponymous restaurant

Joshi Herrmann

25 May 2012

In the display cabinet outside Dabbous on Whitfield Street there are four lines from favourable reviews. The top one, quoting the Standard’s critic Fay Maschler, reads: “This restaurant is a game-changer.”

To Ollie Dabbous, 31, the head chef, it feels like a long time since he read those words, the headline of a review which has transformed his fortunes, thrusting his name into the culinary stratosphere along with the reputation of his unremarkable-looking restaurant.

Maschler’s review, appearing a fortnight after Dabbous opened for business in January this year, brought the foodie world to the unfashionable corner of Fitzrovia opposite Pollock’s toy shop and some dreary offices.

It now has the longest waiting list in London and the Times critic Giles Coren has predicted that the gastronomic establishment are going to “hold him [Dabbous] down and stuff him with Michelin stars like a Périgord goose, until his liver is so fat with processing accolades that he cannot walk”.

Dabbous, who in his brief career has worked alongside Raymond Blanc at Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons, in Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck, at Noma in Copenhagen, with Claude Bosi at Hibiscus and in the kitchens of Marylebone’s Texture, remembers being told that Maschler was in the house. It was just the third day of service. “The general manager said the words that no one wants to hear when they’ve literally just opened. He said: ‘I believe Fay Maschler has sat down at a table’.”

“It was massively unexpected,” he recalls. “We weren’t a high-profile opening. I’ve worked in some known places but I wasn’t a known chef myself so I thought we would have a couple of months grace before people considered us worthy of being written about.” Two weeks later, a “nervous” Dabbous received the extraordinary news that Maschler had awarded his restaurant five stars, only the third time she has done so in the past three years.

When the Standard hit the streets in the mid-afternoon, Dabbous’s manager Graham went to the station and brought back a clutch of copies. “I started jumping up and down,” his business partner Oscar Kinberg remembers. Dabbous says he was “made up” and smiled at Maschler’s choice of words, having predicted to his staff earlier that week that “if it’s a good one that would be a game-changer for us”.

The phones started ringing almost immediately. From being three-quarters full in their first fortnight (“mostly friends of ours and people from the local businesses”), the restaurant was suddenly booked out every night.

Since then, the booking queues have lengthened to ludicrous levels. Early September is the next free slot for lunch, January next year for dinner and February if you want it on a Saturday.

The extreme advance booking means Dabbous sometimes takes walk-ins because forward-planning foodies forget their slot. Apparently this week not even Nigella Lawson could blag a table.

Two diners leaving yesterday — Paul Jackson and his son Garreth — said they were so taken with their lunch they had just booked for August 2013.

“Garreth’s brother booked on the back of Fay’s review in February,” Paul told me. “He couldn’t come, so I came over this morning from Belfast.” During the meal they were texting updates to the unhappy brother, including a photo of the much-remarked-upon coddled egg, which comes with woodland mushrooms and smoked butter — “Just divine,” says Paul, and surprisingly cheap at £7. The seven-course tasting menu, which offers diners a good sample of the head chef’s stripped-down, unpretentious fare, is £49 per person.

In the bar that Kinberg runs downstairs, a couple in their thirties said their table was booked by a friend in February, too.

Maschler, whose visit “catalysed” the arrival of most of Fleet Street’s biggest names (Coren, AA Gill and Jay Rayner have all been gushing), says Dabbous could have predicted the rush. Giles Coren once said: “She puts bums on seats more than any of us,” while Gordon Ramsay told the Guardian a few years ago that a glowing review in her Standard column is better for business than a Michelin star.

Typically modest, Maschler says that “when I am very enthusiastic about somewhere that is not wildly expensive it tends to get a lot of follow-up”.

What did Maschler mean when she said Dabbous would change the game? “Just the synthesis of someone really skilled and full of ideas in quite a gritty urban setting, not charging what he could charge,” she says, having likened it to a movement that Parisian foodies call “Bistronomy”.

“The food tasted so much of itself, and I thought they were very intelligent and intuitive combinations of ingredients. It’s not the sort of food you would knock up for yourself at home by any means, but I didn’t feel a lot of tweezers and hypodermic needles and water baths had been involved,” says Maschler.

Can she remember — in her almost 40 years of reviewing for the Standard — creating a buzz quite like this? “No, but I think that is partly because of Twitter. It makes such a difference and it is such a Twitter-friendly restaurant,” she says. “Also, I do think he’s exceptional.”

Dabbous himself has been “massively flattered” by the write-up. And he was relieved about his mugshot, too. “When you are smiling for a photo for a paper, you are thinking in the back of your head, ‘I am going to look like a dick if we get a crap score’, so at least we got a decent one.”

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