Review: Koyal, Surbiton

Pani puri

Koyal is the third branch of the Dastaan empire. Unlike their Leeds restaurant, this time they’ve opened just a couple of miles up the road in Surbiton. It should make a big difference though: Dastaan is on a suburban shopping parade miles from the nearest train station, meaning anyone from central London has quite the trek to get there by train & taxi. Koyal is just five minutes walk from Surbiton station down the line from Waterloo.

The dining room is colourful and simple. I don’t think any slick design company has been drafted in here to “develop an aesthetic”. But it’s a comfortable dining room and service is friendly throughout. The food is more than friendly, unsurprising as it is very familiar from Dastaan – no bad thing, as it’s still the best mid-range Indian cooking I’ve eaten anywhere, by a mile.

Sweet potato chaat

Sweet potato chaat

We start with pani puri, as tradition dictates. They create consistently superb crunchy shells that never leak, the filling is tangy and the sauce is a brightly bitter-herbal kick. Our other starter is a new one, sweet potato chaat. This is brilliant, all the usual ingredients of crunchy sev, cool yogurt and tangy sauce for a classic chaat but based around cubes of sweet potato that are chewy on the inside and crispy outside. All gone very quickly.

For main we went with the muntjac biriyani. A very good biriyani hidden under the dome of brown seed-crusted pastry, plenty of soft, dense, dark muntjac meat amidst the fragrant rice. I have to admit, though, that our friends’ bhangjeera chicken curry was the dish of the evening, a fiery hot gravy with a melange of spices I’m never going to be able to pick apart. Bhangjeera in particular is the highly fragrant perilla seed, roasted and ground as a spice. So now I know.

Dal and other sides

Dal and other sides

Sides of dal maharani with rich black lentils, and spinach cooked down with garlic and mushrooms, were both excellent as usual. Their wholewheat paratha is a wonder, flakey and soft with only a little butteryness, nutty flavoured from the wholewheat. We were given a complimentary pistachio kulfi afterwards; very good pistachio flavour, but for me it was more like hardened condensed milk than an icecream, just not to my taste.

We went with cocktails and then lassis to drink, and their house cocktails really show off their obvious know-how with spices. I recommend black cardamom and vanilla lassi, but perhaps the mango one was even better. You’ll probably pay up to £30 each without drinks for a meal at Koyal, and this is superb value for the sheer quality of everything. The team from Dastaan can roll this menu out right across the country and I’d be very happy!

Muntjac biriyani

Muntjac biriyani

Review: Ukiyo Hand Roll Bar, Covent Garden

Hamachi jalapeno

So I need to foreshadow this review. I love sushi and sashimi, except for one element of it. The thin seaweed sheet used for wrapping rice in various sushi forms. It’s often hard to bite through, and the texture is neither crispy nor yielding. It’s essentially the closest thing to chewing on paper that exists in popular world cuisine. Hence, I prefer nigiri, I’ll enjoy a roll, accept a maki, and I tend to avoid hand-rolls.

But Ukiyo is a specialist in hand-rolls, it’s what they do. And the way my brain works is, I want to like things, so maybe if I try hand-rolls at a specialist that people are currently excited about I’ll discover what I’ve been missing…?

It’s a very glossy glass box of a place, with beautiful light fittings and a single counter around the three sushi chefs. You perch on high stools and in the background they play disco. Not sure why disco. We pick a couple of cocktails from the list, and my smoky mix of mezcal and umeshu is punchy and good, Maureen’s also great. We choose two starters and two of the hand-roll sets, so that would be five hand rolls each.

Seaweed salad

Seaweed salad

The hamachi with jalapeno is a lovely starter, carpaccio-thin slices of perfect fish given just enough kick and capsicum flavour from the thin slice of pepper and the green jalapeno sauce. Very good. The seaweed salad is a vivid little pile of glossy green, sweetened with dressing and a sesame sauce, very oceanic at first bite but kinda moreish and addictive after that.

Then we have our hand-rolls. I don’t know if it’s an accepted part of this format in Japan, but we are handed our rolls at a pace chosen by the chef rather than us. What I mean is, he often handed us the next roll in the set while we’re still finishing the previous. We’re right there, he can literally see us still with half a roll in hand, so I’m guessing that this is how it’s meant to work…? The rhythmic pace without any pause to chat somehow enhancing the degustatory experience…? Anyway, it amused us more than it vexed us.

Hand roll

Hand roll

The hand rolls were nice. My favourite was akami, simply filled with meaty lean bits of tuna all shredded up. There were two or three “spicy X” rolls (e.g. “spicy yellowtail”) which translates as a bit of pleasingly warm chilli mayo added to the diced or shredded fish. The UKIYO Special was the same, salmon and chilli mayo, with shiso leaf added. Some were decorated with tiny green roe. The unagi was good, as I love sticky eel, although you get a more satisfyingly big piece on a nigiri than you do tucked into a hand roll.

My conclusion? I have the impression that Ukiyo is a place of excellence, and certainly the fish was all beautifully treated by skilled chefs (nice to be able to watch them work). But these hand rolls work out at £8 each for three bites and, alas, I still much prefer nigiri sushi. Chew, chew, chew, the seaweed paper is just such a big part of the hand roll. Especially the last mouthful. You’ll spend £55 each before drinks for what is effectively a very light meal. I know sushi is a luxury, but I just don’t find hand rolls luxurious. This is style over substance, for me.

Ukiyo

Ukiyo

Review: Liu Xiaomian, The Jackalope, Marylebone

The kitchen

Needing lunch, we settled on noodles at Liu Xiaomian, which has been cooking in the basement of the Jackalope pub in a quiet Marylebone mews for a few years now. This really isn’t one of the modern, polished, faux-street-food restaurants that have been springing up all over the trendy corners of London recently (most of which I love, to be fair), this is a big kitchen hatch in front of a tiny kitchen in a pub basement with a handful of tables and a simple “order at the counter, collect your bowl when it’s ready” approach. Little notices printed on an office printer explain the heat levels and lay out the terrifically simple menu. Drinks options are a few cans or bottles from China, or the bar upstairs.

We go for one of each: a bowl of the wheat noodles (beef), a bowl of the glass noodles (mince pork), and a bowl of the wonton soup (pork). The spice levels are bombastic. Not the chilli, though. There’s a good glow of chilli in there but a lot less than a hot Thai or Sri Lankan dish. It’s the sichuan peppers and, presumably, some other regional earthy Chinese spices that I don’t know. But the peppers, citrusy and earthy and astringent, they really are numbing – just as it says on the menu.

Wonton soup

Wonton soup

It’s all utterly delicious. The wheat noodles are perfect, nice springy bite to them, although the thick slippery-silky-gelatinous-translucent glass noodles that squirm in your mouth really have to be tried to be believed! Those wontons are surely among the best I’ve ever had too, soft and satiny.

Full disclosure: my digestive system wasn’t too pleased at having to deal with this much spice, and let its feelings be known for an uncomfortable few hours afterwards! I am a delicate flower. Anyway, at £12-14 for a bowl of superb noodles, you should come and enjoy the sheer spiky authenticity yourself.

Glass nooooodles

Glass nooooodles

Review: Bala Baya, Southwark

Bala Baya

So. Bala Baya describes itself as a Middle Eastern restaurant, as do a few review sites that perhaps keep their info updated. But older reviews and articles, that no-one ever updates, call it an Israeli restaurant. It doesn’t take much nouse to realise why they have re-badged themselves “Middle Eastern” as thoroughly as they can! However, it did make us pause and consider whether we should be patronising an Israeli restaurant. Obviously we decided “yes”. Even with a whole heap of research and background-checking it might still be impossible to know how the folks who own & run the place feel about the current Israel-Gaza conflict. They don’t represent the Israeli state, they certainly don’t support it openly (or their restaurant would still be proudly badged “Israeli”) and they really only tangentially support it fiscally in any way, perhaps with some taxes somewhere. It felt like poor form to boycott a place if you don’t even know where they stand. Enough politics… on with the food!

Aubergine and pitta

Aubergine and pitta

They are tucked away under railway arches in Southwark, but have created a light and airy space, modern and sleek but comfortable and relaxed. The staff looked after us very well too. Cocktails gave a good early sign, clear and punchy flavours. We went with two meat dishes and two veg.

The “aubergine mess” that came first was a solid take on babaganoush, dollops of creamy tahini added, and little chunks of lychee in the mix too. This was a charming variation on the usual pomegranate seeds, the sweet rose taste of the lychee obviously fitting very nicely in the Middle Eastern vibe. Two hot pittas were among the best I’ve ever had, nicely browned with a nutty flavour. Next up was a courgette flower stuffed with cheesy polenta and drizzled with harissa’d honey; a nice take on the dish with a bit of pep from the harissa and gutsier flavour from the polenta, but I’ll be honest I prefer it as a light, summery affair of fluffy ricotta.

Courgette flower

Courgette flower

Brisket on “Moroccan doughnut” (to my mind, a small butter-soaked bagel nicely toasted?) was the dish of the day. The meat was perfect juicy fibres, and the glaze and sticky sauce added a mass of pleasantly rich and spicy flavour, along with a vivid yellow tahini cream on top. Kebab dumplings contained very full-flavoured bits of lush lamb marinaded in spices, but the dumpling itself was just okay; neither soft-n-silky nor crispy, it was simply a container for the lamb. The sweet date jus and pine nuts worked well with the meat.

So this was £40 each before drinks. Although done as sharing plates, effectively a starter and a small main each. It was all very nice but – and judging value is so tricky these days, trying to track against the rampant (necessary) inflation of menu prices everywhere – I’m gonna have to say that this was a tad over-priced for what it was. And £12 for the cheapest red wine by the glass doesn’t help. I’m not wanting to hurry back because the food was genius, and I’m not wanting to make it a “useful local” because it’s not great value. But it was a good meal.

Brisket on doughnut

Brisket on doughnut

Review: Som Saa, Spitalfields

Fermented sausage

Fermented sausage

One of the first new-breed Thai restaurants in London, I was put off visiting Som Saa for a long while due to a sad episode of racism tangled up with the restaurant six years ago (here’s a relevant Twitter thread). But we were at Spitalfields and needed lunch, and I’m optimistic enough to hope that – even if people struggled at the time with basic stuff like apologies – lessons may have quietly been learned.

In any event, the place is still here and their signature deep-fried sea bass is still on the menu. We ordered that, along with a mushroom laab, a pork neck curry and some cashews and fermented pork sausage to start. The cashews are tasty bar snacks, roasted to deep brown with a sweet-spicy-lime-y dusting. The fermented sausage has a great flavour, nicely sour and umami.

Pork neck curry

Pork neck curry

The sea bass is a wonderful beast, curled upon the plate and staring up at us like an angry horror film monster. One side is soft, delicate white flesh and the other is fried to a golden crisp. Both sides are delicious with the big pile of mint-heavy herbs, shallots, lime and chilies piled alongside. It’s a proper signature dish. The mushroom laab was also splendid, powerful earthy-fiery flavours shot through a good heap of chews oyster and other mushrooms. No complaints about the pork neck curry either, which had a brave amount of heat (especially if you stumbled on some of the big bits of chilli) and a mouth-watering sour note.

Som Saa is a good new-breed Thai option. I guess for me it falls somewhere between the earnestness of Kiln and the punchy joy of Plaza Khao Gaeng. You’ll probably pay around £30 each before drinks, which is good value for the quality. We picked a couple of the house cocktails: both good, with clear Thai flavours and highly drinkable.

Sea bass

Sea bass