Walking to Kismet through Borough Market, I hum Green Day’s ‘Basket Case’. It’s not a market that makes me happy, which makes me doubly sad because I love markets. Beneath the soaring green Victorian railway-station-like arches and vaulted glass roof, fruit topped with seed-oil-laced chocolate is being sold in cups, luxury importers have shops, prices are marked up and the same tired focaccia is everywhere. In the few good stalls, purveyors stand bemused as flocks of tourists pour past, grinning at Olde London, jamming street food into their gobs. Pressing against the market’s exterior are eateries – some tourist traps, some good chains and, surprisingly, some excellent restaurants, Elliot Hashtroudi’s Camille the shiniest star.
At end of day, city workers, insurance sellers, the besuited many, turn up to drink, crowding inside and out in alcohol-fuelled bonhomie, the Lynx of the juniors mixing with the Le Labo of the senior staff, mixing again with cotton and polyester. One of these pubs, The Globe Tavern, houses Kismet – a collaborative project between restauranteur Dom Hamdy and chef Keiran Mustafa. It stands in all its original 19th-century glory: a façade of clean white cornices, Borough’s sandy-light bricks, decorated with pubbish pomp and ceremony – hops, columns.
Hot from muscling my way to the bar, I compete for attention with the junior managers. ‘Where’s Kismet?’ I shout. Do not mistake this for an insult: a pub ought to be busy, and – as the Globe is – a place of polished, chocolate-coloured wood, small tables, low light. It should smell of beer and lack pretensions. I am pointed up stairs which creek evocatively, and cross from the vegetable-and-human overabundance below to an elsewhere. The very air is cooler.
Hamdy and Mustafa, whose Northern Cypriot Turkish heritage is honoured here, researched Kismet during long trips to Northern Cyprus and Istanbul, which I watched jealously on Instagram. For months, it seemed, I would see the pair grinning, cheeks a touch flushed, in simple eateries across Northern Cyprus and Istanbul, all abundant in aged quick-fixed furniture, toothy nines and dedes, walls showing their age and chipped plates, while eating endless expert plates of grilled meat and mezze. When I quizzed Hamdy on the new venture, his eyes lit up like saucers of thick yoghurt. He was excited: making a new restaurant is his art.
A small television outside the doorway to the dining room, sitting atop a doily, plays a loop of a handsome Turk, Sadri Alışık in the 1969 drama Menekşe Gözler, in black-and-white, the bright-red ‘Kismet’ logo superimposed. It’s a touch silly, but it works and made me smile; ‘Take a picture’: an announcement like one outside a amusement-park ride explaining what is to come.
Which is: two happily crowded rooms designed by Studio Adra, with help from Hamdy and Mustafa. The spaces’ compact size lends itself to the project, echoing the smallness of simple dining rooms the world over. Beside the door to the kitchen is a fridge, with a beer tap on top: squashed in. Without an interior design firm, this might be a touch jankier, but here it’s all smooth and considered. From the taps flows Basket Case, the house beer – named not for the song I was humming, but for the Istanbul treatment of drunks: being carried from the bar in a basket by a specially trained man.
Half the walls are exposed brick, furthering the unpolished atmosphere, but the others are covered in beautiful panels, in a bespoke nicotine yellow paint by Simon March of Color-Ville in Hastings, reminiscent of meyhanes in Istanbul. Upon all of these are many, many photos, evocative of a longstanding family ownership, of a beloved local joint’s age. It’s a sweet touch, many are by Ara Güler, of Istanbul in the 50s and 60s; others are archival family photos or Turkish flea-market finds. While they are personal – indeed, a drawing I made for Hamdy is somewhere among them – they bear a slight artificiality: they are simply too clean, but this is something a month or so of restaurant grease will remedy.
My real love, though, is for the laced half-curtains – tea-stained antique linen, made by a Lebanese seamstress – and for the perfectly starched tablecloths falling upon the laps of reclaimed Brentwood chairs, their bleached seats showing the wear of time, and the heavy candlesticks by Tom Gontar. Mostly new, yes, but even a 50-year-old bar would have been new once, and the owners would have been proud of this newness; this restaurant is kitted out according to the dreamy fantasy of a grandmother. Interiors wear their age, they grow venerable or tired, become untouchable by the tides of fashion. Kismet’s interior problem is to try to conjure something aged, but since this conjuring is done with beautiful things and grace, a little wear will suffice.
When I visited for the opening party, a Turkish instrument was being played loudly, and glasses of raki were being swapped for beer and then more raki. The food was delicious – Mustafa is a master sauce-maker – and plentiful. It is a place to go with a group and to indulge; somewhere a touch more (but not gigantically!) upmarket than your favourite spot on Green Lanes, but exciting because new and clearly trying – an escape from the throng into a corner of a crowded district that is carefully made. At the end of the meal, strong tea was brought on a steel tray; across from me a Turkish friend clapped, grinning. That tray was found by Hamdy in a rural Northern Cypriot café, of course, and he told me it was so perfect he convinced the café proprietor to sell it to him: it took half an hour to be bent into a shape fit for travel. Go, visitor, and soil Kismet a little so it may become itself.
Kismet, The Globe Tavern, 8 Bedale St, London SE1. Visit kismet.london
