Review: Sentosa, Bermondsey

Spring rolls

Spring rolls

Way back in 2010, in the middle of our year-long trip around the world, we found ourselves in Singapore for three days. This was a wonderful city, both quite alien in many of it’s habits and customs, but also completely modern and comfortable to be in (okay, except sometimes for the heat on the street!). And one day we sat down to one of the most memorable means of our year-long trip: Singapore black pepper crab! Oh, it was amazing, such a relentlessly, nose-drippingly fiery pepper sauce and such a lot of crab to pick through. Big enough crab that the bits of meat were worthwhile even from the smaller claws.

So we were happy to find Sentosa, newly opened in Bermondsey and providing chilli and black pepper crab as their star menu items, alongside lots of other Singaporean/Malay favourites like laksa and char kuey teow. We’ll have to come back to try them, because today was black pepper crab day!

Roti canai

Roti canai

We did grab starters of crispy veg spring rolls and roti canai (oh, and I can recommend their iced Malay coffee). The spring rolls were moreish and crisp on the outside, very trad, just as I remember them. The roti was as perfectly crisp, flaky and chewy as any other specimen in London and the little bowl of potato curry was gently warm and fragrant, perfect for dipping in though I’d have preferred it a bit thicker. However, since the crab arrives 30 seconds after the starters arrived (why does this keep happening lately?!) the roti was also perfect for spare black pepper sauce!

And their midnight black pepper sauce was also tip-top and just as I remember: the first ferocious hit of pepper makes your nose run and leaves you wondering if you can keep going, then magically it all gets better after that, massively full-flavoured and punchy but very edible and terribly moreish. The sauce was puddled over a magnificent specimen of a crab, properly big enough for two to share, and they’d cracked each claw and leg in advance, the brown meat still clinging to the underside of the carapace. Nevertheless, it took us a solid hour to work our way through everything. Seriously. Whole crab isn’t something you can rush. And whole black-pepper crab is like no other whole crab dish.

Sentosa is a simple restaurant in the back of Bermondsey, it’s not fine dining nor designer-chic, but comfy and friendly. If you share a crab, you’ll end up around £35-40 each for food without drinks, maybe a bit more as even a big crab isn’t a massive meal. I can only have it occasionally – such a faff, but such tasty fun – so I’m actually more keen to hurry back and try some of the other Singaporean classics, which also look very keenly priced!

Black pepper crab

Black pepper crab

Review: Ixchel, Chelsea

Yellowfin tostadas

You’d expect a Mexican restaurant in Chelsea to be a little more stylish than a taqueria in Borough Market. Hey presto, Ixchel appears! With a stunning interior of cool creamy walls covered in artfully lighter rustic niches full of ancient-looking Mayan-stylie terracotta figures and some very grand cacti. The colour palette is graceful and restrained. It’s a lovely place to be, though I’d recommend dining at a table rather than the bar; the rustic wooden stools look okay to perch for a quick cocktail, but not for dinner.

The food was very good too, though rather like the decor it has been refined a few steps away from the pure punch and bravo of Mexican cooking. We started with yellowfin tuna tostadas, a really punchy bite on perfectly crisp tostadas with a lovely honest maize flavour that balances well with the brightly dressed raw fish. Crisp garlic chips scattered freely added a great pugent hum. The other starter, beef tataki, included some generously thick and flavour-packed slices of

Pork tacos

Pork tacos

good fillet, just seared on the edge, artfully platted on a dark lake of very tangy, deep and earthy mole sauce. Highly recommended! Only wanting a light meal, we picked out two tacos: the ensenada, a lovely chunk of lightly battered cod, and the pork rib taco. The long stick of pickled cucumber with the fried fish looked a bit spartan on the plate, but was actually splendid and very moreish – I came close to ordering another round. The scotch bonnet mayo could have been a lot more punchy, though. The pork rib was equally good, with a warm and gentle chilli flavour (that could, again, have been a lot hotter for my taste). Our side dish of crispy potatoes was another moreish one, chunks of properly scrunchy fried potato topped with chipotle mayo and some salsa verde buried beneath.

Mention must be made of the cocktails! We both had mezcal variants, Maureen’s a margarita and mine a negroni, and both were superb. Albeit they pushed the bill up a bit. For food we spent around £35 each, but that was definitely a lighter meal. Still I’m sure £45 each would be a properly full feast. For Chelsea, and for the lovely ambiance, I don’t think that’s bad at all.

Ixchel

Ixchel

Review: Cafe Murano, St James

Asparagus

Asparagus

There’s something about Italian cuisine in London that gives us a specific type of restaurant. Common elements: the dishes are pared back, simple Italian classics, the cooking and produce is high quality, and the prices are even higher. Cafe Murano is one of these, perhaps not surprisingly as it’s from Angela Hartnett’s stable and I also have a long-running experience of bistro-versions-of-famous-fine-dining-restaurants underperforming versus actual original independent bistros.

So what did we have? I started with a spring “vignarola” salad of artichoke, peas and broad beans. It was very much exactly that, lightly dressed in mostly oil with not enough herbs to come through. And the few bits of artichoke were happy with that, being so full-flavoured, but the peas and beans left to their own devices were… well, it was basically like a side-order of peas and beans rather than a scrumptious starter. Maureen had five slender spears of asparagus, simply cooked, with a grating of a powerfully good hard cheese on top. Was nice, but £18 is toppy for five slender spears.

Crab linguine

Crab linguine

My main was the dish of the day; gnocchi with lamb neck ragu. Both elements were knock-out, as I’ve never had gnocchi before that were so light and silken, like munching on big fluffy pillows of gentle potato. And the rich lamb neck, cooked to slippery unctuousness with the tomato enhancing the already deep flavour of the meat, was the perfect pairing. Maureen’s crab linguine was a disappointment by comparison. The crab flavour was detectable through the pasta, but only delicately so, and so it was basically “quite nice” rather than something you’d lean over to your neighbour and insist “go on, you must try this!” Again, for £20 that might be okay, but for £38 it’s frankly disappointing.

You’ll pay £60 for three courses before drinks, and the dining room is soothing and informal, the service attentive and friendly. Maureen’s pannacotta was a very nice specimen of the wobbly dessert, made fresher through the use of buttermilk. My lemon polenta cake was fine, but I make a better one (at least to my tastebuds!). But that’s my problem with this particular breed of Italian restaurant, which has been around London since River Cafe opened its doors. The food is all good, I just can’t make it add up to the bill at the end. Let’s go to Padella or Manteca instead.

Lamb neck gnocchi

Lamb neck gnocchi

Review: Supawan, King’s Cross

Supawan

Supawan

Supawan has been around for a while, we just don’t often get up to King’s Cross. Now we feel like we need to find some more excuses to get up there, because it immediately slots into our top three favourite Thai meals in London! Why? Proper, punchy, full-on flavours and really excellent technique. It’s classic stuff, done very well.

The restaurant itself is a lovely little cave of fun decor with a front room overflowing with orchids. None of it came out of a design catalogue, though, it’s all home-made and the more friendly for it. Service was equally friendly and as it filled up on a Thursday evening (we were there early) Supawan had the vibe of a local favourite.

We started with some sweetcorn fritters and an aubergine larb. If you sometimes order sweetcorn fritters for brunch, know that these ones are infinitely better. For one thing, they are mostly sweetcorn, held together in just a web of nut-brown

Sweetcorn fritters

Sweetcorn fritters

batter. There’s also a fragrant load of finely shredded kaffir lime leaves in the batter. And a punchy chilli paste to dip them in. The aubergine larb is a nice idea too; the gobbets of aubergine filling the place of minced beef, surrounded by all the minty sour-hot flavours of larb salad.

We shared father’s red beef curry as a main, with rice and then a green mango salad on the side. The salad might be the highlight for me, lush flavours from the sour green mango, all soused in a perfectly balanced sweet-sour-salty-fiery dressing with shallots and herbs, roasted cashews and some lovely scrunchy-fried little dried shrimps. The beef curry was wonderfully deep and full-flavoured, though, the heat building as you devoured the lovely slow-cooked beef until you’re in that perfect state at the end of a Thai meal: grinning happily and slightly red in the face.

It’ll be something like £35 each for dinner before drinks and without dessert, maybe a bit more if you’ve a big appetite. So it’s not the cheapest Thai food around, but given it’s absolutely one of the best I’ll certainly be back whenever I need to be somewhere vaguely close to King’s Cross for dinner!

Aubergine larb

Aubergine larb

Review: Dim Sum Library, Covent Garden

Shredded potato

Shredded potato

Different food cultures, different norms. Sometimes it catches you off-guard, though. We ordered various bits of dim sum, and then a fried rice main dish and a side dish at Dim Sum Library. Then we were a bit startled when our side dish and two dim sum came even before we’d been served our drinks, and then the other dim sum and the fried rice arrived two minutes later.

But of course we should have known, as we’ve been to Hong Kong and enjoyed some amazing dim sum. And you pick what you want, and it usually appears then-and-there or a minute later. And then you eat it, and maybe order something else, and then when you’ve had enough dim sum maybe you order a bigger dish to finish you off. Just… that’s not usually the way things are done in central London, even in restaurants bringing cuisines from far across the world to us!

Old fashioned

Old fashioned

We were surprised and amused, not displeased. Because the table was just big enough to contain all these plates, and all the food was delicious and the dim sum all scoffed greedily before they had chance to cool down!

It’s a big, high-ceilinged dining room in a grand building, furnished in dark wood and cool paint, with a huge long bar-and-dim-dum-counter to whet your appetite. Service was great, very friendly. Their cocktails are excellent, I had a great old fashioned given some vegetal smokiness with pu’erh tea. Our side dish was one of my favourite Chinese treats; shredded potato salad, and this one was dressed with a good sweet-sharp vinegar and just enough chilli.

The three dim sum we picked were all excellent and felt very original. The char sui buns were baked in a very delicate pastry with a crunchy-sweet crust, the pork inside just packed with the very intense and vivid red flavour of char sui. There was a “Dan dan xiao long bao” which was a lovely soft little boiled dumpling filled with a flavour-packed hit of

Crispy pork dumplings

Crispy pork dumplings

pork and the fiery broth used in Dan Dan noodles. Then the very dramatic little “Yu Xiang” crispy pork dumplings, which looked like alien egg cases on their folded metal platter. The charcoal-coloured crispy rice casing was scrunchy and delicious, and the delicately spiced minced pork filling was a great counterpoint in texture, good flavour too.

Our “black cod fried rice” had less cod than I’d expected; crispy-fried nuggets of the fish scattered through a lovely crunchy fried rice with oodles of fermented black beans for flavour. Extremely moreish to eat, so much so that I’ve just bought a pack of fermented black soy beans to make fried rice at home!

All in all, a great place to have in Covent Garden, I can imagine coming back frequently. Our meal was about £30 each before drinks, though admittedly this was on the lighter side – I could have tucked in another dim sum or two!

Dim Sum Library

Dim Sum Library