Review: Supawan, King’s Cross

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

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!