Kinkally, a Georgian-inspired restaurant and Kinky Bar in London’s Fitzrovia, may look like a Japanese matcha store with its minimalist exterior. But inside, the environment fuses David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks” with “Dune.”
It is a sight to behold — and the lower ground floor is where the magic happens. Stairs lead to a dimly lit open space housing the restaurant and bar. The latter glows with orange-hued lights, evoking a Sahara dust storm. The restaurant has a lighter, sand-washed hue and wabi-sabi furnishings.
“The bar represents sunset, and the restaurant is sunrise,” says Diana Militski, Kinkally’s Russian owner, who describes the space as a love letter to her Eastern European heritage.
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The restaurant borrows its name from Georgian dumplings, known as khinkali, and they are the star dishes on the menu.
“I remember when my mother was at work, I’d cook for my brother. It was mostly meatballs, cutlets and potato purees, but one of the big dishes was dumplings, which are called pelmeni or manti. The dish comes from different parts of east Asia and Russia,” says Militski.
The 30-year-old Militski was born in Washington, D.C., and her childhood was split between the U.S. and Russia, where home cooking is considered a family value.
The menu at Kinkally offers traditional Georgian cuisine with an Asian influence. Highlights include broccoli pkhali, a dish with chopped and minced vegetables, bergamot and walnuts, and chkmerulia, a stew made from fried guinea fowl with lemongrass that’s then cooked on a low heat in garlic sauce.
There is also megruli khachapuri, a cheese-filled bread with summer truffles that’s typically topped with eggs or cheese, and Japanese scallops with bazhe yuzu (otherwise known as walnut sauce) and red cherries.
The dumplings are stuffed with meat, fish, vegetables and spices. There’s a wagyu option with peppercorn plum sauce and svanetian salt; a version with langoustines, wasabi and matsoni, and another made with duck, foie gras mousse and Imeretian saffron, and more.
While Militski may know how to cook, she doesn’t spend her time in the kitchen, and was determined to find a chef who could replicate the flavors of her childhood. While she was looking for the right person, she flew to Moscow to try out the menu at the restaurant Hedonist.
She made an expansive order, tasting every item on the menu and taking notes in her small notebook. The staff at the restaurant suspected she might be an undercover food critic.
After she was finished, she asked if she could speak with the head chef and owner, David Chelidze. She had come across Chelidze on Instagram via a promotional ad with an image of khinkalis.
“The staff’s eyes popped out — they were so scared I was a big food industry person,” Militski remembers.
“He was immediately drawn to the concept of the restaurant [I was opening] because his [career] goal is to bring Georgian cuisine to an international scene. We just immediately felt this spark of the same mission,” says Militski, adding that Chelidze packed his bags to move to London.
The restaurant is Militski’s first foray into hospitality; she was previously a corporate banker. She financed the restaurant with her husband, Alexandre, a private equity investor, and with help from close friends.
“Opening a restaurant is a massive project, but having project management skills is really important. It requires a sharp understanding of accounting and finance. Focusing on the beauty of the restaurant or the cuisine doesn’t make a long-standing successful project — the back of house operations and admin need to be there in the first place,” she says.
She is very much a people person and spends time on the restaurant floor, greeting guests and taking any feedback. She’s also built a diverse staff, with employees who have Ukrainian, Indian and Turkish backgrounds.
When Kinkally opened earlier this year, Eastern Europeans were the primary customers, but now Western Europeans from France, Italy and Germany make up 70 percent of guests at the restaurant.
Her next step is to take Kinkally to New York and Dubai, which she says competes with London’s food scene.
“Dubai is this big incubator of everything; it would be really interesting to test the ground in the Middle East. There’s also quite a big population of Eastern Europeans in Dubai,” says Militski, who is convinced the world needs more dumplings and sexy ambiances.