Review: Toba, St James’s

Toba is an Indonesian restaurant in the glossy little corner of St James’s where all the restaurants need to be wearing a bowtie. You can’t have industrial-retro, handwritten menu boards or bistro furniture here. Which feels like it leaves Toba a little oddly placed, trying to keep a bit of street-food style Indonesian but needing to make sure it stays a bit smartened up and priced accordingly.

So we have a lamb shank curry, and the gravy is a lip-smacking warm and earthy Indonesian curry that I could drink by the gallon, but the lamb shank is unexpectedly just that: a whole lamb shank. And even though I could drink that gravy by the gallon, we actually only get a few spoonfuls of it, quickly lost in the rice and the big dollops of (admittedly lovely) lamb that come off the bone.

To start with we have potato cakes, and I’ve always loved these as snacks, but it’s hard to elevate them to a “dish” and why is there too little of the sweet soy sauce for one of these cakes, let alone three of them? The butter chicken wings with salted egg and chilli sound really good but the gooey mix on the wings doesn’t really sing out with any particular flavour apart from butter.

Our other main dish is cod fillet with a house sauce including torch ginger and an unusual little peppercorn-like spice with a very sour and fragrant flavour. The torch ginger is also good, gentler and more perfumed than normal ginger. The cod had very much fallen apart and I can’t help wondering if a more sturdy and also full-flavoured fish would have stood up to the brightly spicy topping better.

The trio of sambals we ordered alongside are just eye-watering mixtures of fierce chilli. I found they added more pain that relish, even in tiny amounts. Even Maureen – who lives for chilli and coped just fine during the meal – reported after we left that her eyeballs had begun to feel hot.

So, nice to find a more inventive Indonesian restaurant having some fun with the flavours of the islands. But it’s not quite as accomplished as other south-east Asian favourites we love. Open for less than a month at the time of writing, though, so I do think it’s worth trying again once they’ve spent a while tweaking and settling the menu. £40 each before drinks is a bit much for the quality, but this is St James’s!