Kiln on Brewer Street is, by any measure, one of the most influential restaurants to have opened in London in the past decade. The Thai wood-fire cooking that Ben Chapman and his team brought to a narrow counter-seating room in Soho in 2016 — clay pots, charcoal, fermented ingredients, the northern and north-eastern Thai regional dishes that London had barely seen on a menu at the time — changed the conversation about what Thai food in Britain could be and established a template that numerous openings have since referenced, consciously or otherwise.
A second site has been discussed, speculated about and anticipated for years. The Brick Lane confirmation, made this morning via the restaurant group's channels, ends the speculation with a venue that makes geographical sense: Shoreditch has the food-engaged, international-minded, queue-tolerant audience that Kiln's format requires, and Brick Lane specifically offers a physical site — a former commercial space with the kitchen infrastructure and extraction capacity that wood-fire cooking demands — that the Soho original's landlocked Brewer Street location could never have accommodated at scale.
The Format
Kiln Brick Lane will seat 55 covers — approximately double the Soho original's capacity — arranged around a central counter that looks directly into the kitchen and its wood-fired cooking stations. The decision to maintain the counter format in a larger room is a deliberate statement of continuity: the counter is not an architectural choice but a philosophical one, placing the diner in direct relationship with the cooking rather than at a polite remove from it.
The wood-fire setup will be expanded at the new site, with additional clay pot stations and a dedicated grill for the larger cuts — whole fish, sections of pork — that the Soho kitchen has always had to manage within tight spatial constraints. A small private dining section for six to eight covers is included in the Brick Lane plans, the only concession to a format that the Soho original doesn't offer.
The Menu
Chapman has indicated that the Brick Lane menu will share the same culinary philosophy and many of the same dishes as Soho — the fermented pork and rice sausage, the Chiang Mai lamb curry, the Isaan-style larbs — while incorporating new dishes developed for the expanded kitchen's capability. The longer-cook preparations that the clay pots and the wood fire enable over a full service are expected to feature more prominently than in Soho, where the pace of service has always slightly constrained the kitchen's capacity to run dishes with extended cooking times.
The wine and drinks list will be expanded from the Soho original's tight, well-chosen selection. A dedicated natural wine programme and a broader range of Asian spirits are both being developed for the Brick Lane opening.
No reservations policy: as with Soho, walk-in only. No exceptions.
Kiln Brick Lane is targeting a late August 2026 opening.