You’ll likely hear AGORA before you see it, as the clatter of plates and hum of excited chatter reverberates all the way up Bedale Street. When David Carter announced his two-storey foray into Greek island cooking, it was the more sophisticated restaurant OMA that grabbed the headline attention, but this evening you’ll find it's boisterous younger sibling AGORA that’s making all the noise, with queues lining up for grilled meats, salads and fresh, puffy flatbreads.
Inside, AGORA is sleek and geometric - a pleasing, wabi sabi mix of weathered timber, brushed concrete and mottled limewash. There’s heaps of seating packed in, and once you reach the front of the queue you have lots of options - counter seats, tables, booths and even a communal table, though it all depends where there’s a space in the throng. Lucky diners might get seated right by the open kitchen, where fat souvla spin over white-hot coals, and AGORA’s busy chefs shimmy flatbreads in and out of a glowing wood-fired oven.
The styling is very similar to OMA, but where OMA is suave and refined, AGORA fizzes with much more riotous energy. If upstairs is the VIP, this is general admission, and we’re shoulder to shoulder with the crowd ripping up flatbreads and stacking plates to make room for more skewers. We’re still swishing bread through silky tahini when ‘slow grilled chicken thigh’ skewers hit the table - a name that doesn’t remotely do justice to how glorious these juicy morsels are.
Mastering a Greek salad is crucial and AGORA’s is welcome and soothing. More flatbreads arrive in a haze of steam, sporting angry black char marks and three of the fattest sardines we’ve ever seen. A second bread carries a payload of spicy sausage, hot honey and spit-roast pineapple - a smart Hawaiian pizza riff that blows the original out of the water. Is it Greek? No, but sometimes food is so good that it transcends the boundaries of authenticity. It promptly gets dunked in the remains of the tahini, because there are no rules within these walls.
Staff match the energy of the room, zipping from table to table with cocktails (excellent, by the way) and effusing their love of certain dishes. We haven’t even got to an astonishingly good plate of rotisserie pork belly, which at just £15 is the deal of the century. AGORA is already a phenomenal restaurant, but when you consider the value (our food bill clocked in at around £35 a head) it’s downright gobsmacking. No wonder the queues are around the block - this is an instant restaurant of the year contender.