The Knife's Restaurant of the Year 2025: ALTA
- James Massoud
- 4 days ago
- 5 min read
ALTA is Soho’s most exciting new opening: a Basque-inspired restaurant in Kingly Court led by El Bulli–trained chef Rob Roy Cameron and built entirely around open-fire cooking. Drawing on a decade in Northern Spain, Cameron delivers a menu that blends bold Basque flavours with the best of the British larder, from cecina with coffee to blistered squid in Vizcaína sauce and an 850g aged ribeye cooked over the flames. It’s the kind of confident cooking that marks ALTA out as The Knife's restaurant of the year for 2025.
From Spain to London
There’s a moment in every great restaurant when the room falls away and the food pulls you somewhere else entirely. At ALTA, the newly opened Basque-leaning fire-kitchen in Kingly Court, that moment comes early, and it comes often.
The smell hits first: wood smoke, rendered fat meeting flame, a lick of vinegar from a cooling escabeche. Then the soundtrack: the inner ring of Kingly Court humming outside while, inside, the borderless kitchen crackles with the rhythm of a grill crew who’ve clearly done this dance before.
At the pass is Rob Roy Cameron, a chef whose résumé would make any gastronomic historian exhale: El Bulli, Hoja Santa, 41 Degrees, Gazelle. And though ALTA is shaped by his decade in Northern Spain, it’s not a facsimile of Basque cuisine. It’s a London-born, Spanish-minded hybrid: regionally rooted, technically tight, and fiercely ingredient-first. A restaurant of smoke, provenance and patience. A restaurant that feels immediately essential.
A Basque Peninsula Reimagined in W1
ALTA takes its name from the Alta Navarra peninsula – stretching from Pamplona to Donostia – which forms the backbone of the restaurant’s culinary identity. But Cameron and his team, under the umbrella of MAD Restaurants (the group behind the Japanese-inspired MOI on Wardour Street), aren’t interested in rigid authenticity. They’re chasing something looser, more soulful: the spirit of Northern Spain, filtered through the best of the British larder and cooked almost entirely over fire.
Escabeches appear across the menu, but they’ve been rebuilt with British vinegars and oils. Pork comes from Aurox Farm in Dorset; dairy cows from the Lake District. Seafood arrives almost exclusively from the South West. Even the peppers – vital to Basque cooking – are being grown specially for ALTA by Good Earth Growers.
It’s a kitchen that has done its homework, but more importantly, one that refuses to coast on its influences.
The Dishes You’ll Talk About the Next Day
The menu reads cleanly, just ingredients and prices, but the dishes carry the depth, layers and quiet confidence of a chef who knows exactly when to intervene and when to step back. These are the plates that define ALTA:
Cecina & Coffee
A plate that looks deceptively simple until the aromatics hit you. The cecina itself – dark, supple, savoury – arrives sliced thin enough to see light through, yet thick enough to offer real chew. Cameron pairs it with coffee, not as a gimmick but as a structural element: earthy bitterness meeting deep, cured beef umami.
The coffee isn’t dominant; it’s a low hum, a grounding note that sharpens the meat’s lactic tang. It’s the kind of flavour pairing that feels both ancient and completely new, the Basque countryside meeting a London flat white in a way that somehow works.
This is a perfect first plate, a quiet flex, a signal of intent.
Sardine Empanada
The sardine empanada with piparra emulsion is one of ALTA’s purest expressions of Northern Spain. The pastry is laced with smoke from the grill; the sardines, though UK-caught, channel that briny, metallic richness typical of Cantabrian fish.
Inside, the filling carries a subtle sweetness, likely from softened onions or slow-cooked peppers, which gives the sardine’s saltiness a place to land. But it’s that piparra emulsion – creamy, gently acidic, with the mild heat of Basque green chillies – that holds the whole dish together.
It’s comforting, rustic, intensely enjoyable, but the technique is razor sharp.
Squid, Lardo & Vizcaína Sauce
Some dishes are quiet. This one is loud – deliberately, beautifully loud.
Squid is notoriously unforgiving on the grill, but here it arrives blistered, smoky, soft, not rubbery, proof of hands that know exactly when to pull it. Draped over it is lardo, melting almost instantly into the squid's crevices like a savoury butter.
But the soul of the dish is the Vizcaína sauce, a Basque classic built on choricero peppers, onions and garlic. At ALTA it lands somewhere between sweet and sharp, rich and fiery, designed to cling to the squid without overpowering it.
It’s a dish worth crossing town for, and then crossing again the next day.
35-Day Aged Ribeye (850g)
The main event. The dish that will anchor ALTA’s reputation.
Cooked over the open flame at the heart of the restaurant, the 35-day aged ribeye is a masterclass in restraint. It doesn’t need trickery. The fat renders like tallow scented with woodsmoke. The crust forms with that satisfying mix of char and caramelisation.
Cameron’s choice of heritage British dairy cow gives the beef a complexity that mirrors mature Basque chuleta (nutty, minerally, deep), but the flavour is unmistakably British: grass, cream, maturity.
This plate is built for sharing, built for lingering, built, frankly, to show off what the grill can do.
Drinks With an Edge
ALTA’s bar programme, led by Dino Koletsas (ex-Harrods, ex-Artesian), is one of the most quietly ambitious in Soho. Forget sugary crowd-pleasers. The cocktails here lean savoury, terroir-driven, and unmistakably European. Think:
Vermouth on tap
Sherry-laced aperitifs
Bone-dry gin drinks brightened with brine or herbs
Cider from Little Pomona, Naughton and Wilding – the British answer to Basque sidra, poured with flair but without ceremony
There’s also a wall of wines on tap, an evolving list of low-intervention bottles, and some surprisingly serious options available by the glass thanks to the tap system. It’s a drinks list built by someone who wants guests to explore, not just sip.
The Room
Inside, ALTA spans two floors and 100+ seats, including a private dining room for 12 and a heated terrace overlooking the courtyard. The look is earthy and unpolished; brick, wood, exposed concrete, the glow of the grill flickering across the room.
It feels warm without being themed. Modern without being cold. A place that suits both a first date and a long lunch.
Restaurant of the Year
London is full of restaurants referencing somewhere else. But ALTA doesn’t reference Northern Spain; it understands it. It has lived it. It has cooked it. It has burnt its fingers on its grills and stained its aprons with its peppers.
Rob Roy Cameron’s cooking here is smoke-kissed, ingredient-led and tight without feeling precious. The menu is clever but not clever-clever. And the dishes, particularly those we've spoken about, will linger in your memory longer than you expect.
ALTA is a restaurant built with conviction, with fire, with a helluva lot of appetite. And in a city increasingly allergic to risk, ALTA feels like a place that still believes in flavour, craft, and joy.
