Even by London standards, 2024 was a standout year for new openings. We saw Jason Atherton open four excellent restaurants in as many months. Long awaited debuts from the likes of John Chantarasak and Aaron Potter (AngloThai and Wildflowers) landed, and cleared the lofty hype bars already set for them. We adored Cornus, and Lita, and Ibai. We still dream of Fonda’s fish tacos, and of one day having Morchella’s slick cutlery drawers in our own home.
If you’ve visited some of these restaurants, you’ll notice they mostly fall into a category that we’ll call ‘bloody delicious, bloody expensive’. The growing cost of living and eating in London is a real thing, which is part of what makes our 2025 London Restaurant of the Year so special. David Carter’s Greek island-hopping AGORA was already an early restaurant of the year contender when it opened in March 2024, but when you consider the quality to cost ratio (we walked out very full and happy with a £35 a head bill) it becomes an even more gobsmacking achievement.
In a city where there is growing resentment around cost, but also the availability of tables, AGORA’s accessibility really counts for something. Anyone can eat here - all you have to do is stand in a queue and wait your turn. The restaurant seems to explode out of the open frontage and into the street, as though the walls are struggling to contain the energy within. Food is fired out of the kitchen at pace and you’re shoulder to shoulder with the crowd on close-knit tables, ripping into fresh flatbreads, scooping up mounds of spicy whipped feta and fighting over smoke-infused chicken thighs. If your idea of a good time is gently perusing a wine list, AGORA’s unbridled bedlam might not be for you, but it was without doubt the restaurant that made us feel most alive in 2024.
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AGORA's open kitchen counter and glowing bread oven is the heart of the restaurant. Photography: Laurie Fletcher
‘Our number one priority for AGORA was accessibility,’ says David. ‘The idea is that you don't need to spend very much money, and everything on the menu is familiar - nothing is there to intimidate you or educate you. You can wear what you want, come anytime you want. You can always get a table here - there might be a queue, but if you’re willing to wait you’re always welcome. We wanted to create a place where we were never saying no.'
Even more impressive, AGORA was just half of the story - a boisterous younger sibling to more sophisticated OMA upstairs. Carter simultaneously opened two distinct restaurants over two floors in the space of a few weeks, doing marvellous things with a beautiful Borough Market space that needed a complete rip-out, refit and redesign. Where AGORA stands eye-to-eye with the market crowds, OMA’s dark timber and eucalyptus feels like an oasis of calm, lifted above the ruckus.
'We wanted to create a place where we were never saying no.'
‘I always felt fairly confident with the concept for AGORA, but I was nervous about OMA for sure,’ says David, as we plonk ourselves down on OMA’s plush banquettes. He grabs a bottle of water and two glasses and starts pouring; his front-of-house background clearly dies hard, as at no point in our conversation does he let my glass go empty. ‘We'd never launched two restaurants in one site before,’ he continues, ‘and I definitely questioned whether we could do it. I don't think anyone in their right mind doesn’t doubt themselves to some extent, I certainly do.’
Despite his success, he’s keenly aware that even the best planned restaurants are subject to a certain amount of luck. ‘With a new restaurant, you’re rolling the dice,’ he explains. ‘I thought we’d get one of them to work, but both of them? It felt like trying to hit double sixes - the odds aren’t great.’
Despite those odds (one in 36), OMA and AGORA combined to become one of 2024’s big restaurant success stories, as shown by the excited hordes that surround the building on most days. Add that to an enviable portfolio that includes Smokestak and Manteca, and that puts Carter four for four with restaurants by our count. Or quadruple sixes, by his own self-effacing terminology. Those odds are one in 1296, by the way, so it would seem that there is more to Carter’s trailblazing success than pure chance.
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Upstairs restaurant OMA is more serene and sophisticated, serving a seafood-focused menu
Tall, chiselled and sporting a buzz cut, Carter appears more athlete than restaurateur (though it’s difficult to stereotype the latter). His olive green flannel shirt is a perfect tonal match for OMA’s soft green hues, but it definitely has an undercover boss vibe. He doesn’t immediately look like a man who eats out for a living, but Carter clearly lives for restaurants, and his eyes light up at the chance to talk about them. His Bajan accent gets broader and faster as he gets more animated, which does occasionally make him tricky to understand.
‘It’s all about the experience,’ he enthuses. ‘When I come to a restaurant, I’ve got no budget. I’m in your dining room - give me what you want!’ Carter has experienced all the lows of bad restaurants over the years, and as a result, he knows exactly how he doesn’t want diners to feel in his own sites. ‘Ultimately, I’m a punter who just happens to also do this for a living,’ he says. ‘Our job is to make sure everyone walks away from here feeling like they had an amazing time, not intimidated, or snubbed, or ripped off - that’s my idea of hell.’
'Our job is to make sure everyone walks away from here feeling like they had an amazing time...'
As London restaurants become more commercial by the year, AGORA’s focus on experience is refreshing. One interesting example is that Carter and team don’t cost out dishes on the menu - everything is priced based on what feels reasonable. ‘We try not to be too scientific about it, it’s an art,’ he says. ‘When a dish goes on the plate, we’ll price it based on what feels like good value. And if it doesn’t work, just take it off the menu.’
Just as important is a word that Carter keeps coming back to - vibe. ‘We really focus on vibe and energy,’ says David. ‘When you have fifty tables in a restaurant, it gets louder, busier. Voices start raising, everyone’s chests come out a bit and it creates that positive, assertive energy.’ Restaurants should be fun, he says, both for the customers and for the staff. AGORA certainly is that.
![David Carter and team with AGORA's SquareMeal London Restaurant of the Year 2025 Award]()
David Carter and team with AGORA's SquareMeal London Restaurant of the Year 2025 Award. Photography: Laurie Fletcher
Carter’s upbringing is another important part of this equation. Born and raised in Barbados, he grew up surrounded by food, in a culture where barbecuing was the norm. Cooking with fire has been a clear signature of his restaurants ever since, whether it’s smoked briskets at Smokestak, or AGORA’s two-metre-long charcoal souvla, where pork bellies and chicken thighs rotate slowly on spits.
Even as a 14 year old he harboured a dream of owning his own restaurant and he left Barbados to make it happen, working at the Four Seasons, then with the likes of Gordon Ramsay and at ROKA in London. Superficially his story looks like one of pure success, but Carter has taken his licks to get here, though they’re not widely reported. ‘My first business was a total failure,’ he says. ‘I was still GM at ROKA and I had a cafe in Tottenham Court Road. Half the partners wanted it to be Pret and I wanted it to be Nagare! Without realising it, we were already broken as a partnership and it failed.’
'If you don’t feel like quitting at some point, you’ve not tried hard enough.’
David was still working at ROKA in his early entrepreneurship days too; he spent months and months grinding to get his own businesses going. Whilst launching LOAF - his first cafe on Tottenham Court Road - Carter's days would start at a meat market at 5am, buying wholesale meat then he transporting it to the cafe to set up for the day. After that, it'd be back to ROKA for 10am. This might sound somewhat romantic, but there is no romance in David’s voice when he recalls this period of his life. ‘It was grim,’ he says. ‘I had no life. Everyone I worked with just assumed I had been out all night raving.’
Later, whilst he was still getting Smokestak off the ground he would balance a similar schedule, working Smokestak Street Feast on Fridays and Saturdays alongside his Sunday to Thursday job. Even more gruelling, Smokestak's offset smoker needed refuelling every half an hour, which meant arduous overnight shifts just to keep it going. He grimaces at the thought. ‘It was fucking rank to be honest. I don’t care what anybody tells you - if you don’t feel like quitting at some point, you’ve not tried hard enough.’
![pork belly, spicy feta and other dishes at agora]()
AGORA's menu is centred around fresh-baked breads, dips, and skewers roasted over a two-metre-long charcoal-fired souvla. Photography: Laurie Fletcher
He didn’t quit, though. Carter’s stubbornness was the catalyst that lifted Smokestak off the ground. He’s very sanguine about his growth - that hard-headed mentality made it difficult for him to let go of control in the early years, and he admits that he was too involved with Smokestak once it became a bricks-and-mortar site. ‘I was there too much,’ he says. ‘As a leader I think you have to be able to step back and let people have some control.’
When Carter’s DCCO restaurant group was just Smokestak, he was its biggest strength. Now, he says, the group’s biggest strength is the rest of its people. ‘Look at AGORA now, who’s running it?’ he asks. ‘Giulia (Busato, AGORA GM) is the leader. Luis and Felipe (Lucero & Vaz, AGORA co-head chefs) lead the kitchen. They’re running the restaurant, I’m just here to support them when they need me.’
David realised early at Smokestak that if you can’t provide opportunities to good people, you’ll lose them. ‘If you’re standing still, you’re regressing,’ he says. DCCO exists primarily to provide opportunities to those people, and those are the people that have made the likes of AGORA, OMA and Manteca trailblazers for London’s restaurant zeitgeist. Ask anyone for a list of restaurants they’re desperate to go to and Carter’s restaurants are almost universally among them.
David for his part isn’t afraid to spend on his biggest asset. He leads regular staff trips overseas - three last year with more planned for 2025 - so teams can immerse themselves in different cultures. Instead of going away and finding an idea, he’ll take a whole team to see a place, feel it, and buy into it. AGORA isn’t concerned by authentic food, but it is an authentic vibe, interpreted by a team that has spent plenty of time living and eating around Greek islands. Greece through a London lens, if you like.
![david carter, luis lucero and giulia busato]()
Left to right: AGORA head chef Luis Lucero, David Carter, AGORA GM Giulia Busato. Photography: Laurie Fletcher
I ask David if he thinks there’s more to come in terms of new restaurants. ‘I think so,’ he says. ‘I want to support people’s careers and help them grow. If we don’t create opportunity then we lose good people. Expanding doesn’t excite me as much as the chance to do things differently - develop different concepts and develop people’s careers.’ He takes a pause. ‘I wouldn’t want to do OMA again though, or AGORA.’
‘In what way?’
‘I want to do something more warm and homely. This has become quite restauranty and I’d like to go back to something homely. When I was in Greece recently, I ate in family-run restaurants serving great, simple food, so that’s where my heart is right now.’
‘Not every good idea is a good restaurant,’ he says as he stands up to head to his next meeting. So far, though, he has a 100% record when it comes to pulling the trigger. The proof is in the pudding, as they say, and Carter’s art over science approach seems to be working. Whatever restaurant number five becomes, it’ll doubtless be one of the biggest launches of the year. Would you bet against him making four of a kind into a full house? We wouldn’t.
If you could give a restaurateur starting out some words of wisdom, what would they be?
In my early career, I would have said resilience and persistence. While this is still true, now I’d say, it’s mainly about your people – get the right people on the bus!
What's the first dish you learned to cook?
I imagine cremated cheeseburgers on the barbecue, once I was just tall enough to see the grill.
What's your favourite thing to cook at home?
‘Cheesy’ pasta for my wee boy. Cacio e pepe without the pepper essentially.
What's your favourite food destination?
Tokyo is pretty hard to beat at the minute.
If you weren't a restaurateur what do you think you would have been?
I'm still an aspiring architect, so maybe one day…
What was the last great meal you had?
Eteki taverna in Anilio, northern Greece.
Read more interviews with previous SquareMeal Restaurant of the Year winners, including Merlin Labron-Johnson at Osip, David Taylor at Grace & Savour, Rafael Cagali at Da Terra, and James Lowe at Lyle's.