THE CURATED EDITION.
Reportage / London
The former head chef of Kiln opens his first restaurant on Dean Street, named after a cherry-red 1964 Chevrolet and cooked over fire, from Tottenham to the Red Sea.
DINING
Every serious kitchen has a map. Meedu Saad’s runs from Tottenham to the Red Sea, and it begins in the back seat of a car.
Impala, the first restaurant of the former head chef of Kiln, opened on Dean Street in Soho at the end of March 2026. The name has nothing to do with the antelope. It belongs to the cherry-red 1964 Chevrolet Impala that carried his family to Egypt’s Red Sea coast, the summers near Ismailia that shaped a North London boy with an Egyptian father.
Saad worked on the project for five years. The references are specific rather than decorative: river fish baked in bran in Ismailia’s community ovens, clams cooked over small fires on the beach, spit-roast sheep in the Cypriot kebab houses of Haringey. One fermentation draws on a fourteenth-century Egyptian cookbook.
The kitchen works with an open grill and a wood oven. Dry-aged Devon duck is stuffed with black lime and Aswan chillies, roasted over embers and finished with molasses. Sea bass and bream, killed by the ikejime method, are grilled for the skin and rested above the fire. Lamb and mutton come from an Exmoor farm and go slowly into the oven; rice is baked with ghee in clay pots, and yoghurt sets overnight in the oven’s residual heat.
Nothing here is a cuisine. Everything is a place someone remembers.
Saad designed the restaurant with Kiln founder Ben Chapman and Dan Preston, the designer behind Kiln, Smoking Goat and Brat. Concrete pillars meet polished veneers, and the grill sits at the centre of the dining room, where the fire can be watched as much as tasted. Impala belongs to Brian Hannon’s Super 8 group, the same family as Kiln.
Lunch is served every day; dinner runs until half past ten from Monday to Saturday and until nine on Sunday. Walk-ins are welcome, and a private room takes eight to fourteen.
A red Chevrolet, a coastline, a community oven in Ismailia, a kebab house in Haringey. Saad has put the whole journey on the grill, and the car, in the end, was only the first ingredient.
Details and further reading: Impala, 14 Dean Street, London W1D 3RS · Impala, menus and producers · Harden’s on the opening
Instagram: @impala.soho
GABRIEL SILVEIRADO, FOR WAYFARER.
CONTINUE READING
Dining / Reportage
A Michelin star rewards a habit more than a single brilliant night. Sepia in Chicago, starred through fifteen consecutive editions and now under Kyle Cottle, and Ariete in Miami show what the inspectors are really looking for.
Dining / Reportage
Milan never tried to out-Naples Naples. It made pizza in its own image instead: long fermentation, stone-milled flour, tasting menus and wine lists, from Confine, named Italy's best pizzeria in 2026, to the thin, crisp rounds of Le Specialità.
Dining / Reportage
From a shoebox counter in the Haut Marais to a Japanese roastery that seems to stop the clock, the Paris cafés where coffee is treated as craft rather than habit.