Review
William Sitwell reviews Speedboat Bar, London: ‘The food's just too damn good to share’
The latest venture from JKS Restaurants delivers food that borders on the miraculous, on the edge of London's Chinatown
You might recall me raving about the authentic kitsch, flavours and atmosphere of Plaza Khao Gaeng, a southern Thai restaurant in London’s Centre Point, last summer.
It’s a venture from JKS Restaurants, created with a chef called Luke Farrell. Farrell obsesses about Thai herbs and other ingredients and – rather as rhubarb was fetched from the Himalayas in the 18th century – he feels the journey from where they are grown to Britain does them few favours. So he grows his own in Dorset. The resulting zing you get on the plate is tantalising.
He’s now got a new game in town to show off his produce: Speedboat Bar. From the website to the restaurant itself, it’s all loud, garish colours, with laminated menus and scratched metal tabletops, staff wearing bright, tight, branded T-shirts and even a large, framed shrine filled with orchids and photographs of the King and Queen of Thailand.
JKS are good at piling into the set design of their establishments and their fingerprints are all over this neon-lit place on the edge of London’s Chinatown, which strives to evoke the punch-you-in-the-face vibe of loud and funky gaffs in Bangkok’s Chinatown. The idea is authenticity. But as I’ve never been to a Chinese-Thai restaurant in Bangkok’s Chinatown – and you probably haven’t either – we’ll have to take their word for it.
Guy is running late so I plough on, ordering for both of us, starting with chicken skins with something called zaep seasoning. A small white bowl arrives rapidly, containing some golden, breadcrumbed, misshapen bits. I vow to eat just one or two so that Guy’s arrival will not be met with a bowl of breadcrumbs. In one pops. I bite down and am rewarded with a crunch as satisfying as a warm bath after a day’s skiing.
The crisp fleshiness and saltiness of the chicken skins is heightened by a growing heat from this zaep stuff. It sweeps my taste buds, doing a SWAT-style reconnaissance before attacking without mercy. Wow, these are good. I have just one more as my brow starts to sweat. Then another. Rapidly we’re in a Wildean, ‘Why are there no cucumber sandwiches?’ scenario.
Ten minutes in and there’s still no sign of Guy, but a dish of cashew nuts with pork crackling and dried fish arrives, along with one of stir-fried minced beef and holy basil. I start with the former, fabulously crisp and crunchy. The dried fish is inedible on its own but tempered by the oil and the moisture of some green leaves (coriander and Asian leaves from Luke’s
garden), it’s a sort of culinary miracle.
I dab a fork into the beef and break the fried egg on top. The spice is tantalising. I’m like a fish taking a juicy worm. Yes, that hook hurts, but God that worm tastes good. I keep eating. The sweat builds. A plate of ‘Drunkard’s seafood and beef noodles’ arrives, a messy, beige and brown assortment of fat prawns, onions, strips of beef, veg and, of course, more chilli.
I lap it up, vainly attempting to temper the heat with mouthfuls of rice.
Another 10 minutes and the table, like the fields of Reading Festival after the scruffy millennials have scarpered, is littered with three-quarter eaten plates of food. Guy finally arrives. He looks at me quizzically. I’m like a puppy who’s just dragged an open can of paint across a lavishly decorated drawing room; guilt ridden and sweating.
‘The chicken skins were good,’ I mutter. He polishes off the scraps. Not my fault. He was late and the food’s just too damn good.
Read last week's column: William Sitwell reviews The Elder, Bath: ‘I'll rave about this joint well into the new year’