Review: AngloThai, Marylebone

AngloThai has taken on one of those tough challenges: trying to marry the bang, zip and pow of Thai flavours with the requisite richness and finery of a fine dining tasting menu. I’ve not had very many truly great Thai-inspired fine dining dishes over the years, they often either de-power the flavours to insipidness, or become muddy and salty trying to concentrate everything, or actually bear so little resemblance that it seems to be only the dish’s name and description that is Thai-inspired. Did AngloThai do any better? After all, it’s their entire goal and ambition.

The dining room is refined with cool earth tones, the chairs stylish but starkly lacking cushions on their flat wooden seats. Service was friendly throughout, though not memorable. Onto the food!

Very nicely fragrant broth to begin, before some lovely snacks. The candied beetroot in particular has a bold hit of chilli hiding in it, while the crispy noodles topped with mussels were lifted by the lovely bold scent of makrut lime. So different from normal limes, you should seek it out on menus if you’re unfamiliar.

The first starter seems to be becoming their signature; a clever black coconut ash cracker in an intricate shape, filled from beneath with a heavenly brown crab mousse, packed with Thai flavours, to be eaten with a generous dollop of Exmoor caviar. This was a stunner. Next, a little potato cake floating in a pool of splendidly earth and rich Penang curry. Plenty to mop up, so there were puffy chunks of bread with charcoal-blackened edges to go with it. Up next, an even better curry of the most deeply sour-umami prawn flavour, with burnt prawn oil dropped on top for an extra punch. This served with a slice of beautifully delicate and vividly orange trout, perhaps very lightly cured.

For our main we had a nice piece of duck, cooked pink, with another fragrant and tangy curry poured over. It came with a filthy good little remove of confit duck leg and a nutty-spicy flavoured crumb on top, and a lovely little salad of pomelo and carrot on the side; bright, fresh, good pairing. The main was solid but the starters were the stand-out dishes for me. First dessert of carrot and sea buckthorn sorbet on creamy pearl barley, sweet carrot and crunchy bits of grain was a lovely one, full of many flavours and textures. The apple cake dessert with a Thai milk-tea sauce and cinnamon ice cream was also lovely, although with the desserts we were certainly drifting into “really just Thai in name” territory. Very nice, mind you.

The whole meal was a very nice tasting menu, and it was pleasing to have so many true Thai flavours coming through. That said, I think it confirms for me that Thai cuisine is at its best when it’s bright, loud and relaxed. The menu at AngloThai is £125 each before drinks and I think that’s a good deal for the quality and inventiveness of the cooking here, definitely worth a visit.