Kid Soho Restaurant: Sertaç Dirik and David Carter merge two of London’s most respected restaurant lineages into a single, high-stakes opening.
When Sertaç Dirik and David Carter decided to open KID, their new Soho restaurant, together, they brought the kind of pedigree that makes industry insiders lean in. Dirik comes from Manteca, where he built a reputation for uncompromising Mediterranean cooking that feels both ancestral and urgent. Carter’s Mangal II sits in the pantheon of London’s most consistently excellent Turkish and Middle Eastern establishments, a place where technique meets genuine cultural resonance. Neither is a name chasing buzz or banking on Instagram optics. Both run restaurants that have earned their density through years of relentless execution.
The location itself signals intent. Soho has become a graveyard for restaurants that mistake hype for hospitality, yet it remains the city’s most visible stage for serious culinary ambition. Planting KID here means the partnership is ready for scrutiny. There’s no quiet launching into a secondary neighborhood, no soft opening stretching into autumn while word of mouth builds. This is a statement move from two chefs with nothing to prove and everything to gain from getting it right. The collaboration reads less as a merger of egos and more like two craftspeople finally deciding to apply their methods to the same canvas.
What makes this particular opening matter isn’t novelty for its own sake. Manteca’s precision with Iberian tradition and Mangal II’s command of Turkish and Middle Eastern grilling represent different approaches to the same underlying philosophy: respect the ingredient, respect the technique, respect the person eating. When those sensibilities combine under one roof at KID Soho restaurant in one of London’s most competitive postcodes, the result feels less like a trend and more like an inevitability.
