A more refined take on Mexican dining arrives on Turnham Green Terrace… but is the menu there yet?

London’s Mexican dining scene continues to evolve, and Chiswick has a new addition: Mirtala, which has taken over the former Sam’s Kitchen site on Turnham Green Terrace.

It’s an interesting location. Turnham Green Terrace has plenty of neighbourhood charm and good footfall, but it hasn’t always been the easiest street for independent restaurants. Businesses seem to come and go quite quickly here, so I’m always curious when something new opens.

Mirtala has inherited a small, characterful site. The interior is pleasant rather than spectacular, using the warm earthy colours, natural textures and soft lighting that have become so common in restaurant design recently. It works well in the space, but the interior wasn’t really what interested me most.

The building itself did.

The kitchen is downstairs, so dishes have to travel between floors before reaching the dining room. It’s not the most practical setup, especially for a tasting menu where the timing between courses matters.

I expected that to affect the service more than it did.

The service wasn’t flawless, but the team managed the awkward layout well and, for most of the evening, you didn’t really feel the complications happening behind the scenes.

For a new restaurant, I thought that was a good sign.

So, what exactly is Mirtala?

Chiswick already has D Grande, but the two restaurants are doing very different things.

D Grande is casual, fun and much closer to the familiar Tex Mex experience. Mirtala is clearly aiming for something more refined.

This isn’t really the place for oversized burritos, loaded nachos or a quick Mexican fix. The focus is Northern Mexican cooking, with an à la carte menu as well as a tasting menu that feels like the restaurant’s main statement.

I think that distinction makes sense, particularly in Chiswick. There is no real reason for Mirtala to compete with D Grande when it can create its own space.

The question for me is whether the tasting menu is quite there yet.

A tasting menu needs a narrative

My main reservation wasn’t about one particular dish. It was the menu as a whole.

Individually, many of the dishes worked. But as the meal went on, I started noticing the same ideas coming back. Similar sauces, similar toppings, familiar aromas and textures appearing from one plate to the next.

On an à la carte menu, I don’t think this would bother me as much. You choose a few dishes, and those repeated elements can even become part of a restaurant’s identity.

A tasting menu is different.

Once you leave the choices to the kitchen, you expect the courses to take you somewhere. There should be some kind of beginning, development and ending. Not every plate has to surprise you, but you want to feel that the meal is moving forward.

At Mirtala, I sometimes lost that feeling.

The dishes were consistent, but perhaps too similar to one another. At times the menu felt as though it was moving sideways rather than building. The sauces, garnishes and flavour profiles started to blur together and somewhere in the middle I realised I had stopped wondering what was coming next. I was simply waiting for the main course.

That’s probably where I think the menu has the most room to grow.

It doesn’t necessarily need more ingredients or more complexity. It needs a little more rhythm. Something fresh after something rich. A different texture. A change in temperature. A sharper hit of acidity. Just enough to reset your palate and make you curious again.

Seafood already plays a big part in the menu, so for me the opportunity is not to add more of it. It’s to make those seafood courses feel more distinct from one another.

This is where I found myself thinking about Ixchel.

They’re very different restaurants, so I wouldn’t compare them directly, but I remember Ixchel being more adventurous in the way it handled seafood. The dishes felt more individual, and I particularly enjoyed the cocktail pairings. They helped give different stages of the meal their own character.

I’ll come back to Ixchel properly in the next post.

And then came dessert…

Interestingly, the course I enjoyed most may have been the one I least expected.

Dessert.

After a series of savoury courses that had started to feel quite similar, dessert suddenly changed the pace. The flavours felt clearly different from what had come before and, for me, it gave the meal the ending it had been missing.

It was the surprise of the evening.

Not because it was necessarily the most complicated dish, but because it arrived at exactly the right moment and changed the mood of the menu.

A restaurant worth watching

Mirtala still feels like a restaurant finding its feet, which is completely understandable so soon after opening.

What I like is that the direction is clear.

It doesn’t need to compete with Chiswick’s more casual Mexican offering. There is room for something more regional and refined here.

The space isn’t particularly easy to operate, but they handle it well. The interior is attractive without being the main reason to visit. And while I found the tasting menu repetitive in places, I think the issue is more about how the courses are put together than the individual dishes themselves.

A little more movement between courses, a little more separation in flavour and texture, and a stronger sense of progression would make a big difference.

I’ll be interested to go back once Mirtala has had a little more time to settle in.