Hoppers, 49 Frith Street, London W1. No bookings. Meal for two, including drinks and service: £60
I don’t like queuing. I don’t like queuing behind members of my own family to use the bathroom in my own house, let alone behind 14 sweet-natured, patient young people who don’t think standing in line for 45 minutes to eat dinner is bizarre. I am not sweet-natured. I am definitely not patient. Hence I have found the rise of non-reservation restaurants extremely tiresome. Time is precious. I’m getting old. I might be dead soon. I want to know where I’m going to be and when.
Plus, being bitter and twisted, I have always been suspicious that it was all part of a filthy marketing scheme. How better to advertise your restaurant than to have a queue outside it? For example, take Bao on London’s Lexington Street. Each morning at 11.30 they put a sign on the pavement across the road which marks the start of the queue. By opening time at noon, it will be 20 people long. If you have an instinct to greed, it’s very hard not to at least think about joining it. Because surely at the end lies the good stuff. (The Taiwanese street food is great, but not worth the wait. I only queued in a work capacity, ie for money.)
Bao is backed by the Sethi family, who have the golden touch right now. Chef Karam Sethi’s bookable restaurants Trishna and, particularly, Gymkhana, have been the darlings of fatter-walleted London restaurant goers for a while now. (The spiced minced goat curry dotted with jewels of goat brain at Gymkhana is worth saving up for.) Last year they opened another no-reservation restaurant on Soho’s Frith Street called Hoppers, serving the food of Sri Lanka and named after the country’s lacy fermented rice and coconut milk pancakes shaped like a bowl. Being allergic to queuing I didn’t go. I kept not going. I was brilliant at not eating there.
Then a friend told me the queue was fine after 9pm, so I went along. The friend was wrong. We were told there would be a 30-minute wait, so you’d expect me to be grouchy. But no. Having experienced the way a little bit of tech was used to manage it, and weighing up the impact on pricing at a restaurant able to keep its tables constantly full, I’m going to recant. No-reservation restaurants are fine when, as here, the place is surrounded by good bars and cafés and they use a text system to call you to your table from nearby. And yes, I’m told this has been in use elsewhere for a while now, but what the hell would I know about that given I don’t queue?
The point is I did queue for Hoppers, albeit in a very civilised manner, over an espresso with a shot of Amaretto in it at Bar Italia across the road. I’m glad I did. Inside, the space, formerly the Koya noodle bar, has been panelled in glossy wood. There’s rattan on the ceiling, old movie posters on the walls and Ikea plates on the tables. It feels like they’ve done it over with a tight eye on the bottom line for which again, hurrah. I hate going out for dinner and paying an enormous bill to fund the interior designer’s mortgage.
The secret weapon here, other than the extremely good-value food – and the food is marvellous – is the enthusiastic staff in their logoed orange polo shirts. They seem to be on a gentle and genuine mission to educate. And thank God for it, because when it comes to Sri Lanka I am clueless. The menu, which also includes a glossary, is divided between short eats (a phrase which made me flinch slightly; I might want to take my time), hoppers and dosas, karis – the Tamil term for curry – and bigger dishes which we didn’t even make it to. There are some dominant flavours, especially coconut, but there is also a lightness of touch.
From the smaller dishes, hot butter devilled shrimps sounds like a great night out all by itself for £6.50. A generous portion of fat prawns comes in a thick, punchy sauce that has you wanting to run your finger around the bowl. It makes pristine seafood taste slightly bad for you, in a good way. Mutton rolls, a thick but crisp spring roll heavily filled with grown-up spiced sheep, are as good as their name. If you don’t like the powerful lanolin-rich taste of mutton, you will not like these. Do I need tell you that I do? Thought not.
Bone marrow varuval with roti brings two thick logs of sawn-off roasted bone in a sauce flavoured with coconut, alongside a fragile and buttery roti, the batter having been put on the hot plate in a spiral, so you don’t know whether to eat it or hang it as a decoration. Certainly scooping shiny bits of the marrow on to the roti is not an easy process. They provide wet wipes.
These come in handy with the hoppers and dosas. I get the hopper with an egg fried into the bottom, alongside dishes of caramelised onion relish, coriander chutney and a mince of fresh ground coconut, smoked fish, onions and red chillies. It’s a beautiful object, the off-white of ivory intricately patterned and friable at the edges. Tearing pieces off to eat them feels like an act of vandalism, but it’s irresistible, too. The dosa, the hopper’s golden-brown cousin, is a crêpe made from fermented lentils and rice, and comes folded over on itself. We get ours filled with soft, spiced potato fry. This is what heaven looks like when fashioned from carbohydrate.
The stars are the curries: small but intensely satisfying servings for between £5 and £6. The fish is in another ripe, coconut-boosted sauce. But the winner is the black pork, named not after the breed but the roasted spices. In its compelling punch and depth it reminds me (ironically) of the dry meat curry at Tayyabs. (Ironically because that’s a Muslim dish, made with lamb). We tear and dredge and scoop and roll and we are very happy. For all its fire and kick this is dense food and these dishes are enough. And so with a bill for £44 we are done. Admittedly we didn’t drink, but all of that had happened while queuing. I’ll be honest: I’m not going to make a habit of waiting to eat. I’m not that man. The food really has to be worth it. Happily, at Hoppers, it is.
Jay’s news bites
■ Levanter Fine Foods in Ramsbottom is another no-reservation restaurant for which I would queue. Indeed I did. I returned after last year’s review one Sunday lunch to try a slab of their Galician beef, at two-thirds of the price charged in London. It was fabulous. They also have a pintxos joint called Baratxuri (levanterfinefoods.co.uk)
■ Hurrah! Put out the bunting! And so on. Tom Kemble’s brilliant restaurant at the auctionhouse Bonhams, on London’s Bond Street, is to open three nights a week from 1 March instead of just one. He will offer a five-course set menu at £60 a head, with the option of wine from its own in-house wine dealership (bonhams.com)
■ Included in the small print announcing that Bruno Loubet has launched an outpost of his vegetable-focused restaurant Grain Store at Gatwick Airport’s South Terminal is the news that herbs and micro-greens will be grown onsite. It’s not uncommon for airports to be built on fertile land – Heathrow occupies some of the best farmland in the southeast (grainstore.com)
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
