Le Bab

Tucked on the top floor of Kingly Court, just off Carnaby Street, Le Bab set out to do for the kebab what a decade of gastropubs did for the Sunday roast: take a format usually associated with a quick, greasy late night stop and rework it with proper technique and better ingredients. The kitchen team’s Michelin trained background shows in how the dishes are put together, even if the format stays recognisably a kebab.

The paneer kebab, built with barbecue paneer, beetroot puree, crispy onion and a curry mayo, is a genuinely inventive vegetarian option that’s become one of the menu’s better known dishes, while the lamb flatbread sticks closer to tradition but with sharper seasoning and better bread than you’d get from a standard takeaway. A lunch menu, with everything priced under a tenner, offers real value if you’re visiting on a weekday.

Mezze and sharing plates round out the menu alongside the kebabs themselves, and the cocktail list has been developed with the same care as the food, worth ordering alongside dinner rather than treating as an afterthought. The room, up a flight of stairs within Kingly Court’s courtyard complex, is small and can get genuinely busy, especially on weekend evenings when the whole courtyard fills up.

A full meal with a kebab, a side and a drink comes to around £25 to £35 a head, reasonable for Soho and for the quality of ingredients used, and the lunch offer brings that down considerably for anyone eating earlier in the day. It suits casual dinners before a show, a relaxed lunch while shopping on Carnaby Street, and anyone who wants to be genuinely surprised by what a kebab restaurant can do at this level.

The honest note is that despite the reasonable prices, portion sizes on some individual dishes have been flagged by reviewers as on the smaller side, so ordering two or three plates per person rather than one is usually the right call. Reservations through OpenTable are recommended for weekend evenings given the compact room.