Kid’s website says it’s on Frith Street, but the entrance is actually on Bateman Street, thanks to an aggressively discreet front door that will have you wandering around the glass-fronted corner like some confused visitor at Sea Life, pressing their nose against the tank looking for jellyfish and turtles. Here, however, there are diners beyond that glass, and you may cry when you see them inside sipping their gemlik martinis (black olive, black pepper, white vermouth, frozen gin). Warning: do not accidentally wander into Regulation, a boutique emporium of a very different persuasion just 10 metres away and where a very different type of lubrication is on offer. And of stuffing, for that matter. I shall leave the parallels there.

Kid, as its name suggests, favours the use of kid goat, which will either delight or unsettle the British diner, because as a nation we still quibble about goat meat but for some reason raise no such objection to lamb. They have much in common taste-wise, and Kid’s signature dish – a £65 kid with fig leaf and freekeh for two – comes in an earthenware pot looking very much like a plump lamb shank just waiting for all that flesh to be pulled through the cooked grains beneath. The dish arrived heavy and somewhat intimidating, and left picked completely clean, as did the pickles alongside: fat, richness, sharpness, all in perfect balance.

The room is a rhapsody of browns, with an industrial feel and wilfully uncosy, a design movement that I’m calling “sumptuous sackcloth and ashes”, and there’s a long counter that focuses on a central grill. We visited on day four, and the place was already packed with Smokestak cultists, Mangal 2 zealots and assorted food writers, all of them gazing at the fire and tearing at blistered, kaymak-slicked grilled pide, as well as seeded ramazan pide as fluffy as a Turkish morning after too many rakis.

We began with courgette flowers, which at £7 each will make some people reach for the smelling salts. But these are not those flaccid petals draped over unseasoned ricotta with which Brits habitually offend the French. Here, the batter is intensely crisp, the goat’s cheese insides rich, with atom honey to cut through: it’s a crunchy, sticky, oozing delight. A round of bluefin tuna ezme, a fine, fresh tartare in the Turkish style, comes on what can only be described as a poppadom-like cracker – fried, decadent and completely naughty.

The mackerel, however, is when you understand the point of all this live-fire hoopla. A huge butterflied fish with blackened skin comes crisp from the grill, its flesh all soft and meaty, and stuffed with a carrot-based slaw cooked in what tastes like rich, deep shellfish liquor. It’s the undoubted star of this show.

We end with mountain tea rice pudding infused with sideritis, a wild Anatolian herb that’s warm and vaguely honeyed, and finished with a crunchy, brulee top; it’s also one of the finest desserts I’ve eaten all year. Don’t skimp on the mint oil-topped mastic ice-cream, either: it tastes exactly like toothpaste, and I mean that as a compliment.

A very long lunch closed with shots of Turkish coffee that even Carter admitted tastes “slightly muddy”. That coffee sent me blinking into the daylight and I was still wired six hours later. Much as Kid did itself: distinctive, delicious and thoroughly making its mark.