Kismet London, the Turkish Restaurant With a History?

How Does London’s Three-Week-Old Restaurant Kismet feel Sixty Years Old?

At Kismet London, chef Keiran Mustafa and Studio Adra have created more than a Turkish-Cypriot meyhane. They have created a past for it.

Kismet opened three weeks ago in London. I knew this and yet, sitting there over lunch, I found myself having to ask: had this really only just opened? Because Kismet feels entirely plausible as somewhere that has been here since, well, 1964.

Perhaps I should have suspected something from the way you arrive.

First, you walk into The Globe Tavern, a proper pub tucked beneath the railway at London Bridge; itself sufficiently enticing to warrant an immediate mental note to self: come back. Then you spot the Kismet sign and follow it upstairs.

Already, there is a delicious sense of discovery.

At the top, an old Sony television sits on a tiny shelf covered with a crocheted lace cloth. Grainy, vintage-looking footage flickers across its screen beneath the words KISMET 1964. Music drifts towards you. Then comes a dark velvet curtain.

Push through it and London disappears.

Suddenly you are somewhere else entirely: nicotine-toned walls, dark timber, exposed brick, lace curtains, crisp white tablecloths, bentwood chairs and black-and-white photographs that look as though they have been gathering on these walls for generations.

The anticipation has been mounting from the moment you entered the pub downstairs.

And the best thing?

What you find is even better than you hoped. This isn’t simply an interior. It is narrative design, an arrival choreographed almost like the opening scene of a film. Kismet doesn’t just give you a dining room; it asks you to enter its story. And what a story.

A meyhane of his own

Kismet is a year-long residency from chef Keiran Mustafa, formerly head chef at Bibi, and restaurateur Dom Hamdy, whose London restaurants include Bistro Freddie, Crispin, Bar Crispin, Canal and Crispin at Studio Voltaire.

Mustafa’s CV also takes in Chez Bruce, The Harwood Arms and Oma, but Kismet is a different proposition: a turn towards his own Turkish-Cypriot heritage and the food and hospitality he grew up with.

I had eaten at Bibi and Oma and thought it fantastic, so I arrived particularly interested to see what Mustafa would do when the cooking became this personal. The answer begins with the meyhane.

Traditional meyhanes are places built around long, convivial meals rather than conventional restaurant choreography: meze accumulating across the table, food from the grill, raki, conversation and music. You don’t so much progress through dinner as settle into it.

“Growing up in a Turkish Cypriot family, food was always at the centre of gatherings,” Mustafa has said. For him, the meyhane is an expression of hospitality that is “generous, lively and built around sharing.”

More than a restaurant

At Kismet, that idea extends far beyond the menu. An invented past, real memories. The dining room, created by Studio Adra with Mustafa and Hamdy, is a wonderfully convincing exercise in controlled ageing.

Nicotine-toned walls meet dark timber and exposed brick. Bentwood chairs gather around tables dressed in white cloths. Lace softens the windows. Lighting is low. Black-and-white photographs appear to have accumulated over decades rather than arrived with an installer a few weeks before opening. Crucially, the photographs draw on Mustafa’s own family albums.

And here Kismet becomes much more interesting than an exercise in retro restaurant design, because two kinds of memory are operating simultaneously.

Inventing Kismet London

There is real memory: Mustafa’s family, his Turkish-Cypriot childhood and the food he grew up eating.

And then there is an entirely invented one.

Kismet’s visual world extends backwards to 1964. Its imagery introduces supposed former patrons, Gülgün dines at Kismet, 1967; Paşa dines at Kısmet, 1972; Ezgi dines at Kısmet, 1976; constructing an alternative history in which generations of diners have apparently been eating and drinking here for decades.

Except, of course, they haven’t. Kismet opened three weeks ago. That’s the fun.

The fictional archive operates almost like evidence. By the time you’ve encountered the old television, lace, photographs, aged palette and familiar-looking furniture, the restaurant has supplied enough visual clues that its invented history begins to feel strangely believable.

Even 1964 offers a tantalising coincidence. Kismet means fate or destiny in Turkish, and a dice game called Kismet, itself named after that idea of fate, was introduced in 1964. Whether the game explains Kismet’s chosen date is something I have yet to establish. But the coincidence fits this carefully constructed mythology almost too perfectly.

Memory you can eat

Then the food starts arriving and the story becomes edible. This is food intended for the centre of the table.

There is hummus; tarama; cacık; hibeş, whipped tahini with citrus; and girit ezme, a gloriously loose tumble of white cheese, walnut, dill and mint, generously dressed with olive oil.

And then there is atom. Buffalo-milk yoghurt with chilli butter. It sounds almost absurdly simple. It is amazing: thick, cool yoghurt against the warmth, richness and heat of the chilli butter, scooped up with superb blistered bread. One of those deceptively uncomplicated dishes that you continue thinking about after the plate has disappeared.

Hot dishes include bulgur köftesi filled with beef and onion, Swiss chard with yoghurt and chilli butter, sigara böreği with feta and kaşar, and yaprak ciğer, fried liver with onion salad.

Then comes the mangal: lamb-neck kuzu şiş, beef-and-lamb köfte, chicken-thigh tavuk şiş and monkfish with yoghurt and chilli butter, accompanied by meyhane pilavı, fried Cyprus potatoes and salad.

You can eat à la carte or choose the set menu, but either way the pleasure lies in the accumulation: plates arriving, hands reaching, bread tearing, dishes being passed around.

Food as social architecture

And then there’s the music. The soundtrack is superb. The soundtrack to another time

Over lunch I find myself repeatedly reaching for Shazam: Metin Ersoy, Barış Manço, then Jimmy Scott, Sycamore Trees, Motherless Child, Nothing Compares 2 U. Turkish nostalgia slips into jazz and soul. Jimmy Scott’s extraordinary, haunting voice gives way to another sound, another decade, another place.

Like everything else at Kismet, the music seems designed to blur exactly where, and when, you are. It also makes that arrival sequence even more effective. The soundtrack reaches you before the restaurant fully reveals itself: pub, stairs, old television, music, velvet curtain, and only then the room.

On Thursday evenings, recorded music gives way to another dimension, with traditional Turkish musicians, including players of the kanun, the flat, zither-like instrument, performing in the dining room. The atmosphere can build into clapping, singing and diners dancing between the tables.

At that point the meyhane is no longer simply being referenced by the design. It is being performed. Designing the regular.

Creating a tradition at Kismet London

Raki sits at the centre of traditional meyhane culture, and one of Kismet’s loveliest ideas is also one of its simplest. Buy a bottle and don’t finish it and Kismet will keep it behind the bar for you. Come back another day and your bottle is waiting.

On one level, it’s charming theatre. On another, it may be the smartest piece of design in the restaurant.

Because Kismet’s fictional history tells us that people have supposedly been returning here since the 1960s. The raki shelf creates the mechanism through which people might genuinely begin returning now.

A bottle with your name on it changes your relationship with a restaurant. You are no longer simply someone who ate there once. Something belonging to you remains behind after you’ve left. The interior creates the illusion of familiarity. The ritual begins creating the real thing.

And perhaps that’s what distinguishes Kismet from the endless restaurants that try to look “authentic”. Studio Adra hasn’t simply reproduced the visual vocabulary of an old meyhane. Kismet is attempting to recreate some of the behaviours that made such places matter: sharing, lingering, music, recognition and return.

Sixty years of history, one year to make it.

Eventually, if it works, the invented memories will be joined by real ones. There is another wonderful contradiction at the heart of all this. Kismet has gone to considerable lengths to persuade us that it has existed for sixty years. Its residency is scheduled to last one.

The Globe Tavern’s upstairs dining room has itself become something of an incubator for restaurants, with previous residents including Khao Bird, which subsequently found a permanent home in Soho, and Cambodian project Barang.

Perhaps Kismet will follow them. Perhaps this deliberately invented past will eventually lead to a permanent future. There is an appealing circularity to its name too. Kismet: fate, destiny.

For Hamdy, opening here marks a return to Borough Market, where his own journey in food began more than a decade ago. For Mustafa, after kitchens including Chez Bruce, The Harwood Arms, Bibi and Oma, Kismet represents another kind of return: towards his family, heritage and the food around which he grew up.

And for the restaurant itself, the trick is to make us believe it has returned from somewhere too. That old Sony television at the entrance is therefore far more than a quirky prop. It is a threshold.

Outside is London in 2026. No dining room supply the rest of the story.

The photographs tell you people were here before you. The worn-in palette tells you time has passed. The lace suggests domestic familiarity. The food carries Mustafa’s real history. The raki bottles anticipate your return.

Of course, I know the truth. Kismet opened three weeks ago. But for a few hours over lunch, I wasn’t entirely sure I believed it. I came looking for lunch and found somewhere I already want to return to.

Finding Kismet was kismet indeed.

See you soon.

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