Tuesday night in Mayfair and I was meant to be dissecting my friend’s love life over a bottle of wine. Instead, I got hypnotised by chickens turning on a rotisserie like slow-motion disco balls.
TOUM is the latest project from Tarek Farah, the French-Lebanese restaurateur behind Aline Lebanese Kitchen. Here the focus is pure and simple: rotisserie chicken. Only it isn’t simple at all. The birds are brined in herbs, lemon, garlic and honey for half a day, air-dried for another, then roasted in a custom Rotisol oven until the skin shatters and the meat stays scandalously juicy. Watching them turn is theatre. Eating them is borderline indecent.
We ordered a half chicken with fries and salad, also known as Poules Frites, which felt like the only reasonable option for two people in denial about how much they wanted to eat. The toum sauce – the restaurant’s namesake – is a garlicky cloud of joy that ruins you for every supermarket rotisserie forever. There are other options like chimichurri, chicken jus and Café de Paris butter, but toum is the sauce you’ll be thinking about days later.
Naturally, we strayed into small plates and sides. Musakhan rolls stuffed with pulled chicken and sumac vanished almost instantly. A flatbread with heritage tomatoes and more toum managed to feel fresh and indulgent at once. The roast octopus was tender and smoky, while the spicy corn was so moreish we briefly considered a second round before remembering dessert was waiting.
The space itself is worth a mention. TOUM sits on a bright corner of Pollen Street, with windows on both sides and a Paris-meets-Mediterranean palette of burgundy walls, golden counters and soft lighting. The counter seats wrap around the rotisserie so you can watch the birds turning while you eat. Outside, there’s a petite terrace that feels like a proper café spot rather than an afterthought, mercifully insulated from Oxford Street chaos.
We ended with the seasonal soft serve, rose loukoum and pistachio. It tasted like summer bottled in Beirut and sent directly to Mayfair. Sharing was out of the question.
Downstairs is ENCORE, the brand new listening bar. Even in its early stages it already looks like trouble: burgundy velvet, mirrored walls, a full-length bar and a cocktail list that reads like a dare. Pandan rum, artichoke amaro, caviar-topped fried chicken snacks. It promises to be the sort of place you drop into “for one” and somehow stagger out of long after midnight.
TOUM might call itself a Lebanese rotisserie, but that doesn’t capture its ambition. It is Mayfair polish with Mediterranean soul. It is chicken that takes centre stage, garlic sauce that demands loyalty, and a supporting cast of small plates you could happily build a meal around. I went in for a Tuesday catch-up with a girlfriend and left already plotting my return – for another hit of that toum, and a seat as close as possible to those hypnotic, golden birds.
18a Maddox St, London W1S 1PL
