Leydi, London EC1: ‘It makes you feel like Greta Garbo’ – restaurant review
Leydi is the new venture of Turkish-Cypriot chef Selin Kiazim, formerly of the much-loved Oklava. It’s an all-day Turkish restaurant in the Hyde hotel next door to the Old Bailey, so it’s handy if you’re a judge or celebrating winning a trial.
On the surface, Leydi combines two things that, together, I tend to find ominous: a dining space in a hotel and a chef with reputation and talent. Long experience tells me that these things are not natural bedfellows. Fine food, yes, but also tourists with their pull-along suitcases. Fancy menus, yes, but more often than not served to the jet-lagged, who really wanted only a club sandwich. Worst-case scenario: sometimes, the posh, name-chef hotel restaurants barely even exist at all – Marco Pierre White is rarely spotted behind a vat of meatballs at the Holiday Inn in Blackpool, after all.
Happily, in Leydi’s case, however, you’d be forgiven for not realising you’re in a hotel at all. This is a gorgeous, pale, elegant room where boho flourishes and art-deco twinkles mix with pretty tiled floors and large gallery walls. Restaurants should probably not be gendered, but this is a space that is clearly in touch with its feminine side: the walls are a soothing shade of the creamiest, palest pink that’s a bit like a bowl of homemade tarama, while the pendant lighting over each cushioned booth emits light that makes you feel like Greta Garbo on a day off from filming in Istanbul.
You might expect Kiazim’s menu writing – always exuberant, authentic, experimental – to have been toned down a bit for a hotel setting, but even her breakfast menu doesn’t pause for breath. There are eggs broken in cultured butter with sucuk sausages, brioche french toast with kaymak and mahlep cherries, and black bergamot-scented Turkish tea in pretty glasses to sip with caramelised tahini pastries. At lunch, meanwhile, there are 12 different complex meze – please, please order the muhamarra – alongside small plates such as lahmacun, dolma and borek, and that’s before you’ve even considered the kebaps from the mangal or the large plates of day-boat fish with coriander ezme.
This may sound odd, but what I’ve always adored about Kiazim’s cooking is that it makes me eat with my phone in my hand, checking terms and ingredients. “What is muhamarra?” I wondered when faced with a delicate, glossy, red molehill of thick salsa, or salça, made with sun-dried red peppers and walnuts, all reduced and thickened into a sweet, crunchy flavour bomb.
We ordered the “Leydi Deluxe” for two people, which was described as “a showcase of Leydi’s greatest hits” and which, at £50 a head, was exceptional value, especially considering the amount of food involved. First off, a large bowl of fresh, warm potato crisps tossed generously in baharat spices, sumac, garlic, parsley, yoghurt and lemon. Alongside a round of Kavuns off the cocktail menu – or Stoli vodka with yoghurt-clarified raki – these crisps alone would havemade for an elegant lunch.
Next, a basket of pide, somun and lavash breads with a mountain of sesame salted butter. “Pace yourself,” I warned Charles with an air of futility, as a bowl of smoked aubergine innards pounded with garlic and mustard turned up, followed by one of atom, or garlic yoghurt doused generously with vivid red urfa chilli oil. That “small plate” lahmacun was a large spiced lamb flatbread with an accompanying hillock of fresh parsley, pickled green chilli and sliced fresh onion to add to the topping for the full effect. Faced with the Leydi Deluxe, my old sadness about being only one woman with one stomach returned with a vengeance, because, yes, there was chicken shish and lamb adana, as one might find in any other Turkish spot in London, but here they came on a raised plinth of fat-soaked pide and marinated peppers, as well as a buttered rice pilau topped with caramelised onions.
Dessert advertised itself as “seasonal fruit” – phew! – but turned out to be a properly heaving bowl of fresh figs, sliced sweet peaches, plump dates, kumquats and a huge scoop of lemon sorbet alongside a plate of various biscuits, or kurabiye, you know, just in case you might still be hungry.
By this point in the meal, a hotel room within 100 metres of our table would have been very welcome, but Leydi is far from just another tepid hotel dining room. It’s a whirlwind of a restaurant that aims to incapacitate with kindness, an occasion spot to live life large, rather than a “this will do. It’s just downstairs, let’s go down in pyjamas” spot. Although I really don’t think Leydi would mind if you did. Those tourists have never had it so good.
Leydi Hyde London City, 6 Holborn Viaduct, London EC1, 020-3530 8100. Open all week, 8am (9am Sun)-11pm (midnight Fri & Sat). From about £60 a head à la carte; set lunch £24 for two courses, £29 for three, all plus drinks and service.
The next episode of Grace’s Comfort Eating podcast is out on Tuesday 22 October – listen to it here
This article was amended on 18 Oct as our caption had muddled up the mezes.
