Review: Barang, Borough Market

Barang is a Cambodian restaurant residency upstairs at the Globe in Borough Market, although apparently they’re hoping to be opening permanently – probably in Soho – later in 2026. There’s not a lot of Cambodian eateries in the UK, even though it shares a lot of ingredients, techniques and dishes with the surrounding SE Asian cuisines like Thai, Malay and Laotian. Barang could go a long way to fixing this, as their food is excellent.

As usual, the dishes are meant for sharing around a bowl of rice. We start with a brilliant and dressy starter; four generous slices of raw Cornish bluefin tuna, topped with slices of pressed yellow melon and dressed with a mix including coconut cream, lime and herb oil. The fragrant cream and the sweet melon were absolute magic with the tuna. Next up was a much more street-food-ish dish; a platter of raw veggies with a bowl of spiced-up pork mince cooked in coconut to dip them in. I never knew that I needed sturdy chunks of raw rainbow beetroot and turnip in my life, but they were surprisingly lovely to crunch, crunch, crunch through and paired up well with the fiery mince. That said, the very best crudite to bring out the complex fragrance in the mince was the slice of sweet apple. If you try Barang, order this dish.

With our rice we had three dishes more; a pork kampot curry, winter greens with pork jowl, and crispy fried quail. The kampot curry had a lovely deep and sour-earthy flavour, but although the pork had good flavour it was rather sturdy and had a bit much connective tissue to be a great pleasure to eat. The winter greens in black bean sauce were excellent, plenty of garlic and chilli flavour, and the smoked pork jowl added an extra peck of deliciousness to it. The crispy fried quail was absolutely gorgeous to eat, made properly tangy and sweet by the fish sauce caramel that it was bathed in. The shredded and pickled kohlrabi salad on the side also soaked up the caramel sauce very nicely!

We shared a dessert of char-grilled pineapple with its sorbet and candied pecans, nice and light to cleanse the palate after all the pleasant melange of spices. A good-sized meal is probably £40 each before drinks, and that feels about right. I’m already keen to return and try some other dishes, and they could easily become a regular haunt when they’re in Soho.