Review: Chet’s, Shepherd’s Bush

I remember the first (only?) Thai meal I had in America. This was, admittedly, almost eighteen years ago in California. Huge chunks of chicken breast, capsicum peppers, baby sweetcorn, all bathed in a sauce that was gunky and thick with coconut cream and flavoured with… well, nothing. Just the mildest hint of some familiar Thai flavourings – maybe a tad of lemongrass and a whiff of lime leaf. We ate a fraction of it, just to fill a hole.

So I wasn’t sure what to make of the “Thai-American” vibe of Chet’s restaurant in…

Ha! As though I’d eat out somewhere that didn’t already have good reviews. One of the challenges in writing catchy reviews: it’s much easier to be funny trashing a place than praising it, but unless you’re (a) paid to write reviews or (b) a culinary masochist then you’d never waste your time and money at a place that gets truly bad reviews.

The menu at Chet’s is definitely unlike any other Thai restaurant. Although they’re based in the glossy Hoxton Hotel it’s decidedly casual dining: sandwiches, rice bowls, burgers. The Thai comes out in the flavourings and the sauces they throw in with these dishes. And don’t let the casualness fool you, this kitchen puts a lot of care and attention into each dish.

Take the snack we shared: roti with khao soi sauce. The little pot of khao soi was exactly as I remember it from northern Thailand, a beautifully fragrant yellow curry, humming with lemongrass and turmeric. The roti was pliant but fried to a beautiful nutty crispiness around the edges. Pulling off chunks of that half-soft/half-crisp roti and dipping it was a pleasure I could enjoy as a mid-morning snack every day of the week. Best roti ever? Yeah, maybe so.

I ordered a grilled pork rice bowl, a tasty bit of well-charred marinated pork with a pot of zippy satay sauce to pour over it. Simple and satisfying mid-week lunch. Maureen ordered the more main-course-y pineapple rice. This was a magnificent thing: half a pineapple hollowed out, with a cascade of colourful and fragrant fried rice tumbling out of it in a friendly mound. To be fair, this would have done both of us for lunch on it’s own. The rice had a beautifully warm garlicky and gingery flavour, only a little heat, moistened by the pineapple juice and scattered through with the diced pineapple softened by cooking. I can’t use flavours along to describe how satisfying this was to scoff. The neatest touch: they’d fried some of the rice hard enough to turn it crisp and crunchy, adding a great extra texture that actually rather made the dish.

Their cocktails are solid too, a smoky bloody Mary and flavours of banana in the sour. A good lunch would be £20 each without drinks. The evening menu looks to have more solidly Thai dishes on it. I’d be keen to go back, this is a great place to know if you find yourself around Shepherd’s Bush.