Gold — Seven Years of the Same Good Idea

The Pub That Became a Restaurant

The building was the Portobello Gold, a pub that drew the Sex Pistols and Motörhead in its day, and the restaurant keeps half its name. What happened to it afterwards is an unlikely combination: Nick House, the entrepreneur behind Mahiki and Whisky Mist, took it on in 2019, had Felix and Valene von Bechtolsheim do the interiors, commissioned Matt Whiley and Rich Woods to write the opening cocktail list — and then put Theo Hill, formerly of the River Café, in charge of the food.

On paper that reads like a scene restaurant with a chef attached for credibility. In practice the kitchen won. The founding team came via the River Café, Pizza East and Soho House, and what they built is four floors above Portobello Road with an open kitchen at its centre and a garden room with a retractable roof behind it. The whole front of the building carries a mural by the Portuguese street artist Vhils, two painted eyes called Eye Contact, running pavement to roof and watching the market.

It is a lot of personality for a restaurant to carry. The food is better than it needs to be given all of it.

Everything Over Fire

The method is the whole proposition. Dishes go into wood ovens or over open flame and are treated as lightly as possible afterwards — produce-led, minimal intervention, plates brought to share as they are ready. The current menu is served as cicchetti: ten small plates, no courses, no order imposed on the table.

It reads almost austere. Burrata with charred peach, Parma ham, radicchio and balsamic. Stracciatella with onion agrodolce, raisin and toast. Chargrilled mastelo, the Greek cheese from Chios, with marinda tomatoes and mint. Wood-roasted purple potatoes with chimichurri aioli. Rainbow carrots with goat's yoghurt and sunflower seed gremolata. Roasted cauliflower with spiced yoghurt, cumin, toasted buckwheat and coriander. Braised pork meatballs with San Marzano tomatoes and grilled bread. Braised beef short rib agnolotti with porcini butter. Oysters with mignonette. And, in its entirety: Mushrooms, toast.

Two words. It was one of the best things on the table, which tells you what this kitchen is confident about.

The burrata was the other standout at that end — charred peach against Parma ham and the bitterness of radicchio, a combination that only works if the fruit has been near enough to the fire and taken off at the right moment. The pork meatballs in San Marzano tomatoes with grilled bread are the most straightforward thing on the menu and among the most satisfying. The short rib agnolotti with porcini butter is the one dish doing something technically ambitious, and it earns it: the braise is rich enough that the pasta has to be good to hold its own, and it is.

We ate all ten and everything was good. Those four were the ones worth going back for.

The Menu It Opened With

Here is the interesting part. Gold's opening menu in 2019 featured burrata with charred pears, Parma ham, radicchio and balsamic, and wood-roasted cauliflower with toasted buckwheat, cumin, yoghurt and coriander. Both are still here, the burrata having swapped its fruit for the season.

A restaurant that keeps its opening dishes for seven years is making a statement, whether or not it means to. Plenty of kitchens in this part of London rewrite the menu every quarter to stay in the conversation. Gold found a method — wood, good produce, very little done to it — and a handful of dishes that express it, and has largely left them alone.

The risk is obvious. A menu that changes slowly can stop being an argument and become a habit. But the counter-argument arrived on the table: the dishes that have lasted are the ones that deserved to, and a kitchen confident enough to put Mushrooms, toast on a menu in Notting Hill is not coasting.

Why It Earns Its Place

Portobello Road has no shortage of restaurants trading on the postcode, and Gold has every ingredient of one — the nightlife pedigree, the celebrity opening, the mural, the late licence running to half past midnight and beyond at weekends. It would have been very easy for the food to be the least interesting thing about it.

Instead the kitchen is the reason to go. Cooking over fire is unforgiving, because there is nowhere to hide a poor ingredient or a lapse in timing, and sustaining it across four floors and a late bar for seven years takes more discipline than the room's atmosphere suggests. The service matched it — unhurried, well-judged, and entirely unbothered by the scale of the place.

The scene is still there if you want it. The point is that you no longer have to put up with it to eat well.

The Lifestyle Edit was invited to Gold to sample its October 2026 menu. The invitation did not determine our assessment, and the restaurant did not see this review before publication.