Telephone: 01634 220 893
Address: The Black Bull, 186 Church Street, Cliffe, nr Rochester, Kent.
Lunch for two, including drinks and service, £40.
Of all the pubs along the north Kent coast between Gravesend and Whitstable serving Malaysian-Thai food, the Black Bull at Cliffe has to be the best. OK, it's almost certainly the only pub along the north Kent coast between Gravesend and Whitstable serving Malaysian-Thai food. Out here on the banks of the bloated and elderly River Thames, where the locals think the exotica of the east refers to a night on the town in Margate, the Black Bull is hardly likely to be fighting off the competition. But even if it were, I suspect it would still come out on top.
Though not perhaps on grounds of aesthetics. Cliffe is more of a sprawl than a village - a sub without the urb whose simple dwellings, untroubled by the fussy demands of beauty, reach out in all directions like bindweed yet to be taken in hand. Similarly, the Black Bull is never likely to find itself designated a world heritage site. There's nothing wrong with it. Nothing at all. It's just completely unremarkable: a great solid lump of a Victorian boozer like a thousand others across the country. Outside it's all red brick the colour of clotted blood. Inside it's heavy wood panelling, fake mock-Tudor beams and Artexed walls. There is a real open fire and a real piano (there are far too few pianos in pubs these days), but other than that, everything is pretty average.
Apart from the food. The landlords are Mike and Soh Pek Berry. The clue lies in that second name. Soh Pek, who is Brunei Chinese, trained as a midwife but decided to stop delivering babies and start delivering food when they bought the pub 13 years ago. Her menu is a kind of walking tour of Asia, albeit one for those with sturdy legs. The bulk of the dishes come from Thailand but there are also contributions from China and Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore. Today, when almost every high street has its Thai café, there are few if any real surprises among those listed. The menu is a familiar collection of green curries, satay, pad thais and general stir-fries. But when they started doing it in the late 80s, before Thai food had really taken hold here on the back of increased travel to the country, it must have been revelatory. Frankly, it's still pretty revelatory to find Asian food this good being served in a pub and - to expose all my metropolitan snobberies - even more so here in north Kent.
Downstairs, in a large, arched cellar space with a real Roman well in one corner, is a restaurant which is open evenings and Sunday lunchtimes. Weekday lunches are served in the bar area and that was where I ate, alone, on a quiet Monday. From the shorter lunch menu I began with the satay. Six dainty skewers of beef and chicken arrived. The meat had been cut ultra-thin and then folded in on itself as it was threaded on to the sticks, before being marinated and briskly barbecued. It was crisp but tender. The crunchy (rather than sludgy) satay sauce was terrific: not too sweet and with a distinct but not overwhelming chilli end.
My chicken green curry to follow came in a deep, wide dish with a timbale of steamed rice upended into the middle, so that as I attacked the curry the fragrant, chillied liquor seeped upwards through it. Again it was a model of its kind. All too often green curries come cloyingly oversweetened, either with palm sugar or, in the most brutal of versions, with the white granulated stuff. This was neither too sweet nor too salty. At the risk of sounding like Goldilocks (I look dreadful in pigtails), it was just right.
Seasonal mixed vegetables in oyster sauce, which I didn't need but ordered in an attempt to give the menu a proper shakedown, was spiky with garlic. The vegetables still had a real bite to them. I finished with the house special: a soft, rolled Malaysian pancake stuffed with sweetened shredded coconut and served with a scoop of coconut ice cream, a light syrup and a jug of unsweetened coconut milk. It reads like coconut overkill, I'm sure, but it isn't. That said, if you don't much like coconut, it would probably be best not to order it.
Most days there are specials listed on the blackboard. It is one of those that is most likely to bring me back because occasionally they include Soh Pek's Singapore laksa. I will cross whole counties for a good laksa, a fabulous dish of seafood and noodles in a lemongrass broth with coconut milk and chilli which just happens to be the best hangover cure I have ever come across. (The finest laksa in London is, in my opinion, served near Farringdon tube station, only a few hundred yards away from The Observer 's offices, at a small Chinese-Malaysian place called Ginger and Spice, 37 Farringdon Road, London EC1; 020 7242 6008.)
The other thing which will get me back to the Black Bull is the wine list. Upstairs in the pub it is short. Actually, short is overstating things. In the bar they serve just the one red wine, a soft, rounded Cabernet/Syrah which went rather well with everything I ordered. Then again, they do have a long list of real ales which has brought them the enduring affections of Camra, so perhaps they don't need more than one. Downstairs in the restaurant, however, the mainly New World list boasts some truly stunning bargains, including a 1995 bottle of that fabulous Lebanese red Chteau Musar at just £19.95, and a 1998 Turkheim Gewürztraminer at £15.95. Neither of those are things you would expect to find in your average boozer on the shores of the Thames. But clearly, despite appearances, the Black Bull is not your average boozer.
Contact Jay Rayner on jay.rayner@observer.co.uk
