Ottolenghi Nopi

Nopi has been on Warwick Street since 2011 and has successfully resisted the temptation to coast on the Ottolenghi brand. It would have been easy for the flagship restaurant of a now-global name to lean entirely on the reputation of the cookbooks and the deli branches; instead, Nopi has kept pushing its own menu forward, distinct enough from the more casual sibling sites that it still functions as a genuine destination in its own right.

This review looks at what’s kept that ambition intact through fifteen years of imitators.

The Room

Mirrored, marble-countered, brass-trimmed. Bright at lunch, warmer at dinner — the room shifts registers convincingly across the day, working equally well for a business lunch and a livelier group dinner later on. The open kitchen at the back keeps a constant visible energy in the room, without ever tipping into the kind of noise that makes conversation difficult.

Warwick Street sits in one of Soho’s quieter pockets, close enough to the busier drag around Carnaby Street to draw passing footfall but calm enough that the restaurant doesn’t rely on it. The mirrored surfaces throughout do genuine work bouncing light around a room that would otherwise feel narrower than it is, and the effect is a dining room that reads as considerably more spacious and airy than the actual floor plan suggests.

What to Order

Courgette and manouri fritters, aubergine with black garlic yoghurt, hispi cabbage with miso butter, chargrilled octopus as a main, and the chocolate, raspberry and ginger cake — always, split four ways. The kitchen’s real skill is in combining textures and unexpected flavour pairings across a handful of small plates rather than in any single dish alone, which is why ordering broadly across the menu produces a much better meal than committing early to one or two mains.

The aubergine dish in particular rewards attention — a vegetable most kitchens treat as a supporting player is given genuine top billing here, finished with a black garlic yoghurt that manages to be both funky and creamy without either quality overwhelming the other. A table of four ordering six or seven small plates between them, rather than four individual mains, is consistently the better way to experience the range of what the kitchen is actually capable of in one sitting.

The Drinks List

Big, clever, slightly showy, with a generous by-the-glass section and an unusually strong set of Greek and Lebanese wines that most Soho wine lists don’t bother stocking. Staff are happy to steer a table toward something unfamiliar if asked.

What You Will Pay

Around £65 for three small plates and a main each, shared pudding, and one glass of wine per person, which for cooking this inventive and a room this polished is fair value rather than a premium charged simply for the name attached to the kitchen.

The Verdict

Book for four, order everything bright green, and try not to finish the cake before the plate arrives — sharing generously across the table, rather than protecting individual portions, is the correct way to eat here. The 4-star rating reflects exactly that: a kitchen still worth the detour to Warwick Street, not a name coasting on its own reputation.

What’s Being Said

A menu built for sharing that actually rewards it — order for the table, not for yourself, and trust that the kitchen’s combinations work better in concert than any single plate does alone.

It’s easy to forget, given how thoroughly the Ottolenghi name has entered home cooking through the cookbooks, that Nopi predates most of that written output and was where a good deal of the signature flavour combinations — black garlic with yoghurt, miso worked into a vegetable dish, unexpected citrus and spice pairings — were first tested on paying customers rather than readers.

Eating here now is, in a real sense, closer to visiting the source than a branch that came later, and the kitchen’s continued willingness to keep pushing the menu forward rather than simply serving the greatest hits from the books is the clearest sign it hasn’t settled into being a museum piece for its own reputation.