Review: Ekstedt at the Yard, Whitehall

Ekstedt at the Yard is one of those restaurants that has gone all-in, put the gas and electric out to pasture, and claims to cook the entire menu on wood. This is why there is a mighty pizza oven just by the chef’s table, ensuring an extremely cosy evening no matter how many layers you try and strip off. We’re definitely at “peak wood” in restaurants, even though in an adjecent world there’s a lot of evidence gathering that wood-burning stoves are one of the remaining top pollutants in our towns and cities and should probably go the way of the petrol car. What that will mean for open-fire cooking in restaurants I have no idea. Presumably their industrial extractors already take out a lot of the emissions that would otherwise be puffed up a chimney?

Ekstedt is tucked away in the New Scotland Yard hotel, down in an atmospherically dark dining room. It can’t really help that, there are no windows to speak of. Sat at the chef’s table we get a good view into the working kitchen and they made it more of an experience by inviting us in to watch the first starter being cooked using a dramatic, sputtering, red hot dipper of beef fat. Forging oysters! Which were very lovely, the texture still raw inside, the flavour of the fat coating the sturdier outside, and dressed with a cream and herb oil.

The eight course menu had some delights and a couple of duffers, a lot of smoked flavours as you’d hope, but surprisingly no charring or scorching on anything. Perhaps they find it difficult to balance the finicky needs of “fine dining” with the robust cooking needed to char-grill meat or veggies?

Little canapes of beef tartare and smoked trout were good, the beef densely flavourful and paired with salsify and a hit of coal oil. Then came the oyster, very good, though the flavour of the cream and herb oil really powered over much of the subtlety of oyster-cooked-with-burning-beef-fat. The little wholemeal flatbread “taco” was a properly Nordic not, with a little fricasse of cauliflower and mushroom flavoured powerfully with juniper. Nice filling, but I found the flatbread a bit dry and worthy.

Very much loved the cuttlefish and pickled mushroom ragout, with noodle-y slivers of thin white cuttlefish laid over it. This was followed by a perfect piece of cloudy white turbot, served with fat, sweet, smokey mussels and a Jerusalem artichoke puree. A very nice fish dish, but another dish where it was hard to see how much the open-wood cooking was contributing. Next up was sweetbread and for me this was a failure. Under-cooked sweetbread is just a gooey, sticky mess of white protein with an unpleasant flavour. Oo-er. I’m sure its what they intended, and I liked the hay smoke flavours that pair very well with sweetbread, and the little crunches of toasted buckwheat seeds, but when four out of six diners leave the majority of a dish, and the other two ate it but didn’t like it at all…?

The main course of lamb was fine, with roast fungi, aubergine puree, and little lollipops of lamb belly terrine served off to one side. The lamb itself was neither the most delicate nor the most flavourful that I’ve had recently, and I still somehow felt that all the fire, iron and smoke going on just the other side of the service pass wasn’t really coming to anything on the plate. It was a nice bit of lamb.

Good puddings. Nice little strawberry palate cleanser. Then a truly excellent cep souffle, unabashedly mushroom-y and the wonderful aromatic cep only enhanced by the sweetness of the dish. Woodruff ice cream was a perfect pairing, the funky hay-like foraged flavour working well with the cep. Juicy blueberries gave a slightly acidic balance.

So the menu ended on a strong finish. And we were very well looked after all night by the team, the sommelier in particular spending a lot of time talking over the wines on the wine flight. And of course, this was a family celebration, so everyone had a great time and the food gave us plenty to talk about. But I’m left with an odd question. What’s the point of all the wood and iron and flames in the kitchen, if so much of that primeval pleasure gets polished away by the needs of fine dining?

Ekstedt’s tasting menu was £150 each when we ate at the chef’s table, and it was fine but isn’t going to be one of my best meals of 2025.