Review: Long Chim, Soho

Long Chim

Long Chim

It feels like Long Chim kinda tricked me. A little bit. Their spiel says: “Long Chim, meaning to ‘come and try,’ invites you to an authentic Thai dining experience. We strive to capture the vibrancy and energy of modern Bangkok, serving the food found in the alleyways, the markets and the shop houses in Thailand’s capital.” So… yeah, I was expecting a Plaze Khao Gaeng kinda vibe. Bangkok street food in London.

But it isn’t really. The dining room is designed to within an inch of its life, down to the hundreds of glass bottles with fake/fun labels in smoky glass cabinets. It’s actually very lovely, a great atmosphere and friendly service, but its a properly grown-up dining room a million miles from any street food vibe. I’d have to say somewhat the same of the food: very lovely, but hardly taking me back to my last visit to an actual Thai street market.

Squid

Squid

Long Chim spring rolls are a great snack to start: the long cigarillos of crisp pastry totally out-style your average dumpy spring roll, and the mustard green-packed veg filling had plenty of its own tangy-sour-umami flavour even before a dip in the sweet soy sauce. The grilled squid had a great char, cooked nicely al dente. The beef skewer was full of earthy spice flavours from the marinade, the charred beef itself also strong and… hm… beefy. Really, that’s the best word. So far, so good.

Monkfish curry was amiable enough, but the curry seemed to wander about for me, hardly carrying a lot of punch or any single clear flavour shout. Forgettable. The crispy five-spice pork was better. The meat inside a vivid pink from curing, and the salt-tang of the cure carried right through the nice crispy outside and all the spiciness in the accomanying melange of bits-n-bobs. Shallots and chillies and whatnot. Our third dish was a pomegranate salad, which surprised me by being a genuine salad of plentiful pomegranate muddled up with mint leaves and yogurt. Some grilled fresh red chillies in there gave off the occasional bold hit.

Crispy pork

Crispy pork

I enjoyed the food at Long Chim, and they mixed up a couple of very solid cocktails: a banana old fashioned full of warmth and the oily-creamy banana flavour, and a negroni with grapefruity notes. You might be looking at £35 each for a decent meal before drinks, which is good value for the setting. But if I want Thai street food, I want a face full of powerful flavours and an unabashed bang-up of sweet-sour-hot-salt. So it’s unfortunate that Long Chim has opened only two doors up from Speedboat Bar, ‘cos I know which of the two I’ll be picking!
Long Chim rolls

Long Chim rolls

Review: The Greene Oak, Windsor

Mackerel

Coming back from a long enough trip abroad (this time, a six week jaunt around northern Spain) gives you the chance to look at what’s back home with a somewhat fresh gaze. At least, if you try hard enough. The English pub really is perhaps the most distinctive piece of our human landscape, very different from a Spanish cafe-bar, a German beer hall or a French brasserie. Obviously pubs come in all shapes and sizes, but if I ask you to close your eyes and picture a country pub, you’ll be picturing something like The Greene Oak: old wooden tables and chairs, a floor of timber or flagstone, probably timber on the walls or above in the form of beams or panelling, windows that look at least a hundred years old, plenty of glass and brass behind the bar or around the room. And I think this particular ambience comes into its own when the nights close in and the leaves turn red and gold on the trees, when you want to get in out of the weather and meet up with family or friends.

The Greene Oak sits at the end of the road headed west out of Windsor, and looks just like any other food-focused pub in the home counties. The menu is broadly traditional, with a few more ambitious ingredients and combinations than usual. I started with a grilled goat cheese salad, a full-flavoured goat with crisp chicory leaves, apple matchsticks and watercress. Easy to like. Maureen’s mackerel fillet was an excellent piece of fish, skin grilled good and crispy, with a few oyster leaves and a “squid bolognaise” which sounded pretty splendid on the menu and was on the plate a nice thick tomatoey sauce/ragu. Worked well with the mackerel but didn’t shout squid to me.

Fish n chips

Fish n chips

Maureen went with the battered hake and triple-cooked chips. They were both perfectly good specimens: the batter on the fish wasn’t oily, the fish inside was great, the chips were crispy and moreish. Their tartare sauce needs calling out as particularly fine, creamy but punchy. My haunch of venison was a dense, full-flavoured piece of meat. Nice char on the surface. Lush bacon and onion gravy. The two savoy cabbage leaves, flat and chewy underneath the haunch, were a strange accompaniment. Maybe they were meant as set dressing? Bambi’s forest glade? The starch alongside was macaroni cheese with shredded nuggets of slow-cooked venison shank through it. I declare it to be a Very Good Thing.

Somehow I had enough room for a pudding, and went for Sticky Toffee Pudding. Haven’t had a STP in years. This wasn’t bad, but the pudding didn’t have enough date-induced stickiness unto itself (if the pudding is dry without the toffee sauce then it’s not a great pudding) and the butterscotch sauce was tasty but without the necessary blackened toffee bitterness to cut the sweet.

You’ll be down £50 each for three courses without drinks, so this isn’t a cheap pub dinner. Quality was good, but there’s a bit of damning-with-faint-praise there. I’m not going to remember this meal in a week, and if I’m looking for a pub dinner around the Windsor area again then I’ll probably be inspired to try somewhere else.

Venison

Venison

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