Review: Kricket, Soho

Most of Kricket is counter seating, which is great because it’s fun to watch the tandoor in action and the flames occasionally leaping up around the skillets. But! The stools here are properly upholstered and properly comfy, setting Kricket apart from a whole host of other Soho mostly-counter dining options.

Oh, and I want to call out the service too as having been particularly attentive and friendly throughout. We get good service almost everywhere we go (side-rant: we get good service in 99 meals out of 100 and probably eat out that often every year, so I do want to ask all the people who leave bad service reviews online… is it them, or is it really you?) and at Kricket it was notably good. After our first dishes arrived, the manager even paused to check whether we wanted to cancel any of the later dishes now we’d seen the size of what we’d ordered. Thoughtful! But, no… it all looked far too tempting.

How about samphire pakoras for an insanely moreish snack? A big pile of little crispy battered wrigglers, drizzled with tangy tamarind sauce and dipped in a pot of spiffy chilli-garlic mayo. Their bhel puri was also as good as any I’ve had, a great balance of sweet, citric, spice, cream and crunch.

Venison tartare with a warming spice to the meat, scattered with lots of Jerusalem artichoke chips and some splendid black garlic chutney was perhaps the dish of the day. Their house fried chicken was tasty, with a gentle curry leaf mayo to dip it in, but didn’t really knock my socks off. Final dish was a burnt garlic tarka dal, good flavour and texture, and it went very well with the awesome wild garlic kulcha that we ordered as our bread. Lovely and buttery and garlicky.

They’ve got a strong cocktail game at Kricket too, with really clean and distinctive flavours like the fragrant saffron vermouth in my “Reversal” and punchy flavours of chilli rum and mango blended well in Maureen’s “Dark Matter”. You’ll spend £32-ish each for food, and this is instantly among my favourite modern Indian street-food-style cooking in London.