Multi-award-winning musical Kinky Boots is strutting back into London, and luxury Indian restaurant Colonel Saab has answered the call with a four-course pre-theatre menu inspired by the show. With the London Coliseum not even a minute’s walk from the Trafalgar Square dining room, this brilliant themed set menu makes for a seamless start to the evening. It was so well thought out and so immersive. We didn’t want to leave!
A Trafalgar Square Showpiece
Colonel Saab is anything but understated. Dripping with chandeliers, jewel-toned interiors and antique treasures collected by the family across decades, the restaurant feels closer to a maharaja’s living room than a West End restaurant. It is exactly the kind of opulent setting that a Kinky Boots evening needs, where the night ends with sequins, drag queens and red patent leather thigh-highs. There’s a shared sense of drama and playfulness.
Sex Is In The Heel
A Kinky Boots Cocktail and the Sex Is In The Heel Amuse Bouche
Things start with a whisky-based cocktail called the Kinky Boots, lifted with elderflower, pomegranate and raspberry. It’s light enough to drink easily, but still has a bit of presence. Exactly the right kind of opening number for a four-course menu inspired by a musical.
Then comes the amuse bouche, Sex Is In The Heel, a Banarasi Amrood Ki Chaat reimagined as a heel-shaped guava cone, filled with tamarind chutney, raspberry sauce and spiced cream, finished with crisp gram flour noodles. It is playful, it is clever, and it tastes like the kind of bold layering Colonel Saab is known for. It also photographs beautifully.
History of Wrong Guys
Starters: Land of Lola or History of Wrong Guys
For the second course, diners choose between two song-titled plates. Land of Lola is the vegetarian option, a crisp-coated Calcutta-style zimikand and beetroot tikki served with lime chilli pickle, beetroot murabba and homemade kasundi sauce. The textural contrast between the crunchy coating and the sweet beetroot is amazing, and the kasundi gives it a mustardy lift.
The non-vegetarian alternative, History of Wrong Guys, is an Anglo Indian Chicken Chop: pulled chicken cutlet served with salad and a sweet-savoury tomato raisin relish. It nods to the colonial-era Anglo Indian kitchens of Calcutta and Madras, and it is a good introduction if you’re less familiar with regional Indian flavours.
Everybody Say Yeah
Mains: Everybody Say Yeah, What A Woman Wants or Hold Me In Your Heart
The main course offers three options, each named after a song from the musical. Everybody Say Yeah is a Kerala-style Beef Pepper Fry with coconut and Tellicherry black pepper, served alongside flaky parotta. It’s rich and fairly bold, so probably best if you’re in the mood for something heavier.
What A Woman Wants is Memsaab’s Chicken Curry, slow-cooked in a light cream sauce flavoured with sweet spices. It is gentle, fragrant and elegantly composed, the quietly sophisticated choice. For vegetarians, Hold Me In Your Heart is the Gutti Vankaya, an Andhra-style baby aubergine curry in a tangy tamarind gravy that quietly steals the show. The aubergines are stuffed and slow-simmered until they collapse into the sauce, and it is one of the most memorable dishes on the menu.
Raise You Up
Raise You Up: A Sweet Finale
Dessert is “Raise You Up”, a delicately composed pineapple jalebi served with Rabri Chantilly cream, pistachio kulfi, a crisp tuile and pistachio-infused oil. It is a more refined finish than you might expect from a jalebi, with the cream and kulfi tempering the syrup-soaked sweetness of the fritter. It is also, in true Kinky Boots fashion, beautifully dressed, finished with a single edible flower.
A Word on the Show
After dinner, it is a one-minute walk to the London Coliseum, where Kinky Boots is running for a strictly limited season from 16 March. Directed by the award-winning Nikolai Foster, whose recent credits include Grease and The Wizard of Oz, this is the Tony, Grammy and Olivier Award-winning West End and Broadway hit in full swing, with music and lyrics by pop icon Cyndi Lauper. The story follows Charlie Price, a struggling shoe factory owner who, in an act of last-resort genius, partners with drag queen Lola to manufacture thigh-high boots and save the family business.
Strictly Come Dancing favourite Johannes Radebe stars as Lola, bringing the charisma the role demands, while Matt Cardle takes on Charlie. The result is a joyful, big-hearted production that earns its standing ovations, with Cyndi Lauper’s score doing what only the best musicals can: sending you home on a bit of a high.
Book the Experience
The £75 four-course Kinky Boots menu is available at Colonel Saab for the duration of the show’s run, with Kinky Boots playing at the London Coliseum for a strictly limited season until 11 July 2026. Go before the curtain rises for an evening with the right pairing of food, theatre and a very good cocktail.
For more information, visit Colonel Saab
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All Images Courtesy of Colonel Saab and Kinky Boots The Musical.