You can’t fail to spot Karpo. Located opposite the red bricks of St Pancras Station, this restaurant’s bold and vivid facade stands out from the crowd. The brightly coloured, graffiti style, decoration of the exterior is a very bold statement and is backed up with cool design and good food inside (although fortunately it’s not all quite so garish!). They have what they call a ‘living wall’ with plants growing on it. So indoors and out Karpo’s walls are a bit off the wall.
The food is from American-born chef Daniel Taylor – who worked with Jeremy Lee when he was at Blueprint Café – and is loosely Mediterranean. It’s all very fresh, tasty and reasonably priced. Jay Rayner described Karpo in The Guardian as “a welcome arrival in a redeveloping King’s Cross, which has become the home of too many chains and identikit caffs, and far too little real cooking”.
When we called in to ask about their disabled facilities they told us that they have a disabled toilet in the basement. Brief concerns that they may have put a disabled accessible toilet in an inaccessible place were quickly abated when they us that there is a lift down to the basement rather than having to take the stairs. The entrance is step free and the ground floor is very flat. There is extra seating upstairs which is not accessible but you don’t need to go there anyway.
Karpo looks vibrant from the outside and by all accounts lives up to the image inside. We give it a provisional 2.5 BBS Ticks.
