Alta review: Serious Spanish food amid the Carnaby crowds
Alta, Kingly Ct, Carnaby, W1B 5PW | Nearest Tube: Oxford Circus
With its jolly pink furniture and candy-striped awnings, Kingly Court has an air of unreality. It’s a Disneyfied version of what food culture might look like if it were imagined by a private equity firm, a place designed to house tourists grappling with their disappointment that Carnaby Street, once the epicentre of Swinging Sixties counterculture, now consists of outposts of Benefit and Abercrombie & Fitch.
To get in the spirit of the place, I first stopped by the basement cocktail bar Disrepute, where John Profumo is said to have once had an illicit liaison with a young Christine Keeler. It’s now a kind of 1960s theme bar, where cocktails called things like Manifesto and Femme Fatale are served for £18 a pop to people looking for somewhere “a bit different” for a first date. It is exactly the kind of place you would expect to find at Kingly Court.
Alta, on the other hand is… not. I thought I’d got the wrong address as I wandered past Pizza Pilgrims and Le Bab and Island Poke, losing confidence that a serious and highly recommended Spanish restaurant would keep such company.
Located at the far end of the market, Alta seems almost embarrassed by its brightly-coloured neighbours, its facade painted in a muted palette of earthy browns and greys. You could quite easily walk past it, which I did. Twice.
Inside the theme continues, with everything hewn from wood or stone. The roughly-plastered walls resemble sheets of cracked rock, like you’re sitting in a charming country mesón rather than a multi-storey shopping complex. The best tables overlook a kitchen that’s not just open-plan but plonked directly in the dining room, chefs silently working without so much as a line on the floor to separate them from the paying punters. This has a democratising effect, like they just happen to be making the food this time but on another occasion it could have been me or you or any of us rattling the pans.
Alta is focused on the cuisine of Navarra, which lies on that sliver of northern Spain that’s had an oversized influence on global gastronomy over the last three decades. It’s not technically part of the Basque Country but it’s close enough that there are probably half a dozen non-Spanish people who could explain the difference, and I’m not one of them. Heading up the kitchen is Botswana-born Rob Roy Cameron, who had a career as a fashion photographer before working in the kitchens of chefs including Michael Caines and Albert Adrià.
There’s real quality running through his relatively slight Alta menu – it’s all designed to be shared, naturally – from the neat little row of smoked Cheddar doughnuts in hot honey to the indulgently fatty strips of cecina (air-dried smoked beef), which is cured on-site. While many of the dishes are simple expressions of well-sourced ingredients, Alta is not above a bit of culinary engineering, as demonstrated by the chicharron (fried pork rind) in mojo rojo (a smoky red pepper sauce from the Canary Islands). This is the Platonic ideal of a pork scratching, an impossibly light canopy of fried fat topped by a dusting of lime, perched upon a puddle of vivid-orange sauce. Wonderful. A neat circle of smooshed potatoes come with a bright green puck of verde butter: at Alta, the colour is all in the food.
Elsewhere there was a banging bowl of crab rice with pomelo (a kind of big, mild grapefruit), the delicate crabmeat offset by the rich, bisquey carbs. I could eat this all day. We shared a giant cut of 35-day aged sirloin topped with little chunks of smoked bone marrow, which was great in the way a giant cut of 35-day aged sirloin topped with little chunks of smoked bone marrow tends to be. Not much messing around involved but the steak, cooked over an open fire, was excellent, probably the best plate of meat I’ve had since I was last in Smithfields’ Basque steakhouse Ibai. In fact, Alta as a whole reminds me of a pared back Ibai, which is praise indeed given it’s among my favourite new openings of the last few years.
The excellent staff – knowledgeable, just the right side of pally – kept us generously soused, recommending thoughtfully mixed cocktails made using patxaran (a traditional Navarrese liqueur) and a nicely paired, slightly funky riesling with enough muscle to cut through the kilo of fat quivering on the table.
Alta would be perfectly at home down a Mayfair mews or nestled beside a Spanish orchard – instead it’s a compelling reason for Londoners to brave these tourist-laden streets, a strange little oasis amid the capitalist theme park of modern day Carnaby Street.