Dining Out 011: ARCA and The Counter Soho
Dinner in Amsterdam and dinner in Soho.
Do you ever have weeks where you feel like you are living in that meme where Lady Gaga is describing her hectic schedule, and she’s like “Bus, club, another club, another club, plane, next place, bus, club” or whatever? I am coming off the back of one of those.
Over the past few days I’ve eaten in restaurants in both Amsterdam and London, and I also lost my driving license at a Charli XCX DJ set*, so in the spirit of that whirlwind, I thought that instead of one long review as we normally do, you might instead like to hear a couple of tidbits about two of the places I visited. The first is ARCA at art’otel Amsterdam, and the second is the newly opened The Counter Soho. I found stuff to like about both! Let me tell you about them.
One thing about me is that I absolutely love hotels. [Alan Partridge voice] “Can I just shock you? These places that are designed with the utmost comfort and convenience of their guests in mind? I enjoy them.”
I like hotels for the same reason that everyone else does: they make me feel glamorous and I absolutely j’adore having a massive, comfy bed and a wall-mounted telly. So when I was asked whether I’d be interested in going on a trip to try out art’otel Amsterdam (a luxury hotel with an emphasis on art, its own gallery space, and two sister hotels in Battersea and Hoxton in London), and its new restaurant ARCA, it was basically like asking me “Is your favourite food garlic bread?”
As such, last Thursday, via the magic of London City Airport**, I found myself in the beautiful city of Amsterdam, engaging in one of my favourite pastimes (FaceTiming my mom from a fancy room and showing her all of the different settings you can apply to the bathroom lights while she goes “Oh my GOD”). And after a little boat trip and a solo trot around De Negen Straatjes, I also ate at the hotel’s restaurant ARCA, where they make elaborate, artful plates inspired by Portuguese flavours.
The kitchen at ARCA is helmed by Portuguese chef Henrique Sá Pessoa, whose Lisbon restaurant Alma has two Michelin stars (he also has a London restaurant called JOIA). Interiors-wise, surfaces are black and shiny, and at dinnertime, the room is lit low, but strategically too, to make the dishes – and the guests – look their best. Long story short, ARCA is the sort of place you put on a little heel and a push-up bra for.
I was with a group of press colleagues, and we were served a menu of seven courses (I think that’s a Dining Out record? Say what you want about me but I do be giving you variety). This started out with seafood, and ended up with three desserts, which is the type of Henry VIII-ass move I am compelled to respect.
The first two courses were raw fish dishes, and of the two I was especially keen on a tuna tataki (that is, tuna which has been very lightly seared), which was served with a freakishly delicious seaweed cracker that massively intensified the taste of the fish. Third up was my highlight of the evening, which came in the form of a round little bowl of dense arroz de marisco, packed with shellfish – your prawns, your scallops – and a seemingly bottomless well of flavour.
The rice was as comforting as you want from something like this, but the care taken in the fish cookery kept it fresh and banished any denseness, and it all totally took me to a beachside restaurant in a place where it’s 24 degrees at sunset and a pack of cigs costs about four euros. In general, I always prefer a gutsy, more casual dish to a fussy, frou-frou, Michelin-y vibe unless the flavours are absolutely knockout, so I really appreciated the addition of the arroz to the menu. I think this was the dish that won me over to ARCA – it was kind of a flex, as though they were saying “get you a restaurant who can feed you a simple, nourishing bowl AND arrange some fish on a plate so it looks like a painting.”
Elsewhere, my other ARCA favourites were a weirdo but undoubtedly clever “cauliflower tart”, served with a peanut butter base, and a green curry-inspired sorbet, which featured big whacks of chilli and coriander; a tiny, tiny madeleine served as part of the petit fours; and the bar’s version of a martini, which came served with “marine foam” – this looked like bath suds, and I found it stupid and charming and novel, and totally in keeping with a martini’s specific sense of madcap 1940s movie humour.
Now obviously, a Portuguese restaurant might not be the first place you’d think to head if you were in Amsterdam for one or two nights only. I’m with you – I like to try local foods most of all too. But if you’ve got a longer stay and you fancy giving a tasting menu a go while you’re in town, ARCA’s a great choice, because you get a bit of everything. Plus, if you pair it with a stay in art’otel, you too could have a go on those bathroom light settings. Dream night if you ask me.
A few days after I got home, and once I’d come to terms with the fact that I live simply ‘at my flat’ rather than in a gorgeous hotel room with multiple fluffy bathrobes in the wardrobe, I consoled myself with a low-key, Monday night dinner at The Counter Soho, where I was joined by my friend Hannah (the Hannah thing is getting beyond a joke at this point, I know).
This place is a sister restaurant to The Counter Notting Hill which opened in 2022, and focuses on food whose origins can be described as Aegean, Levantine and Mediterranean – broadly, that means they serve mezze from all over those regions, from Greek tzatziki to Syrian muhammara, plus then a few larger plates like adana kebab and a market fish. As I mentioned a while ago in my entry about Evi’s in Dulwich, London is totally wild for this type of food at the moment – even at restaurants which specialise in more pan-European cuisine, I see dishes like borek and skewers constantly – and the opening of The Counter’s Soho location, I guess, is more proof of that.
Given that it’s a brand new opening, the place is very sleek inside, with a counter like the one the restaurants are named for in the middle (though I do think it would be cooler if there was at least a little bit of food prep happening here to give more of an actual “counter” feel). When we arrived, Hannah and I ordered cocktails – she picked the Yia Mas (vodka, strawberry and lemongrass) and I went for the Kalamata (more savoury, with gin, Lillet Blanc, and thyme syrup), and our waiter, who was so enthusiastic and knowledgeable, quickly recommended some of the mezze options.
I’m generally always happy to go with the flow – I am not fussy and I think it’s fun to try what the staff at a place are proudest of or think is coolest or most delicious – so we ended up with a tableful of vegetarian dishes (indeed, veggies might be interested to know that a good 75% of the mezze menu here is meat-free). The roster included white chocolate babaganoush, pickle tzatziki, house muhammara with pistachio, an Istanbuli tomato salad, hummus with dates, and a huge portion of cheese saganaki. We were also delivered a bowl brimming with shoestring fries***, and a few portions of flatbread, which had that specific, tactile flatbread character – i.e. when you tear into it and your hands are just a little bit oily afterwards – that I really love.
I think with a menu as big as the one at The Counter Soho, there are always going to be some dishes that stand out more than others. Of what we had, I’d probably lose the babaganoush and the salad. In the case of the latter, I didn’t think the tomatoes – which, let’s face it, in the UK are an embarrassment to the name of tomatoes everywhere else – really stood up to their seasoning of sumac and molasses. And where the babaganoush was concerned, the chocolate overpowered the mild aubergine, and I don’t think the balance of sweet and salty was quite achieved.
There were other places on the menu, however, where that balance felt right, even if the seasoning of the dishes was quite consistently heavy-handed. The hummus with dates was great, given a further savoury edge with paprika oil, and I couldn’t stop eating the saganaki – garnished with honey and, unusually (but really effectively) mango chutney – in that way where you’re thinking “my body is saying I should stop here” but your mouth is like “bro have you tasted this though?” Elsewhere, I also thought that the pickle tzatziki was brilliant. Is it not kind of inspired, when you think about it, to make this dish with pickled as well as fresh cucumbers? The result was a more tart and therefore more lively dip than you’d get otherwise. I licked the spoon.
After our mezze, Hannah and I skipped the larger plates in favour of dessert, which meant tahini ice cream in a sexy metal coupe, and a monstrous (in a fun way) baklava cheesecake, which was essentially like a baked cheesecake inside layers of baklava pastry, and was as indulgent as it sounds (wisely, it was served with a scoop of raspberry sorbet to slightly offset the sugar with a bit of sour.) For a little sweetness at the end of the meal, both were tasty if lacking a bit of finesse – the molasses was too cloying for the ice cream, and the cheesecake could have been firmer inside.
I’m someone who really loves sharing food and trying bites of everything – before I am a daughter and before I am a friend I am a Picky Bits girl – so I was always going to enjoy something like The Counter Soho. With that in mind, then, I think the ideal occasion for a visit to The Counter would probably be in one of my favourite eating scenarios: a lunchtime on a day when you have otherwise been bopping around central London, doing the How Many Free Samples Can I Get In Liberty game, and perhaps picking up a few gorgeous little bits (top from Uniqlo, vase and a pack of like, miniature toothbrushes from Tiger) to numb the pain of life under capitalism and so on, perhaps. This place, with its Carnaby location and sharing ethos, would be a nice place to have a cocktail and some mezze plates, while feeling sort of like you were in Sex and the City. If the characters bought their stuff from Zara instead of Valentino.
* Only to quickly find it again thanks to someone who had typed on their phone – in the brat font and colours – “lauren o’neill i have your driving license”. Do sort of feel like you didn’t really go to partygirl if you didn’t have to have your possessions returned to you by a stranger.
** London City Airport was the most incredible flight experience of my life, by the way? You don’t even have to get your liquids out of your bag for security? I felt like I was, in the words of the Black Eyed Peas’ “Boom Boom Pow”, living in the year “3008.” My only criticism is that I would have enjoyed more food options in the departure lounge. A Shake Shack for example. A little cheese fry. Would it hurt?
*** You may have noticed that shoestring fries are everywhere you look right now, and while I do always enjoy them, they also make me slightly mournful for their greatest ever iteration: the ones you used to get at Gourmet Burger Kitchen. Sound off in the FUCKING comments if you remember this goated chip!!
Both of these visits were arranged by Tonic Communications and I am very grateful! But obviously these are my honest opinions xo
Dining Out is written by Lauren O’Neill and illustrated by Lucy Letherland. Weekly reviews are free to read every Thursday, but if you’d like to see more, you can subscribe for £5 a month or £50 a year, to get extra content every second Sunday. Click below to see paid and free subscription options, and thanks very much for reading.
See you next week!
The GBK fries shoutout awoke something dormant inside of me.