Sambal Shiok (inside Blend ), 587 Green Lanes, London N8 0RG (020 8341 2939). Walk-ins only for groups of six or fewer. Full meal including drinks and service: £60-£80
As a student in the 1980s I used to go Interrailing around Europe each summer on trips that always ended in Amsterdam. It’s not what you think, or at least not quite. It speaks volumes for the adult I became that my first anticipatory thought of the city was not the opportunities offered by the liberal drugs laws, or the cartoonish displays of sex in the red light district. It was the brightly lit, chromium-clad fast food automats in the streets off the Leidseplein, one of the city’s more notorious squares.
There would be three walls of coin-operated mini-windows. You dropped in a couple of guilders and the lock released; you lifted the transparent flap and took out a carton of freshly cooked chips or croquettes. So far, so mildly innovative. It was what happened next that made the whole thing thrilling. You went to the sauce station. Obviously, this being Amsterdam, you could have mayonnaise with your chips which to this north London boy felt transgressive, even though both items were freely available in London. Look at me, swanning around Europe eating my chips with mayo, like some culinary Sally Bowles.
Far better though, far more of a boundary smasher, was the satay sauce, which you squirted from a nozzle into your chip carton. The Dutch had a colonial involvement with Indonesia, which that impeccably liberal country has long found hugely embarrassing. This condiment was the high-tide mark left upon its culture by that moment in history – a seriously spiced peanut sauce with chilli heat and a garlicky kick, which moved the chips dredged through them from the column headed mundane to the one headed face-slapping exotica. Dope and porn you could get in any European city; perhaps not as easily, but you could get them. A friend tells me. But a satay sauce like this, heavy with the aromatics of Asia? That made Amsterdam special.
I was transported back there by the peanut sauce at Sambal Shiok, a self-styled laksa bar that has popped up for six months in far north London, after a period first as a street food operation, then in residence elsewhere. Theirs is looser than the mass-produced Dutch version, spun through with pieces of uncrushed nuts and even more aromatics. There are hits of ginger and fresh chilli. It accompanies a compelling starter of deep-fried chicken thigh, in a crumbed coating which arrives at the table so fresh it actually crisps up on the plate. Is the sauce something to augment the chicken, or is the chicken a vehicle for the sauce? I lean towards the latter. Indeed, I’d go further. I’d say everything at Sambal Shiok is about the sauces.
Alongside some pretty average deep-fried vegetable dumplings comes a ginger and chilli sauce that somehow manages to be both fiery and soothing at the same time, both a pinch of the cheek and a back rub. We order a second pot, just to spoon away on its own. Chilli pickles are hefty with mustard seed and the muskiness of turmeric. It’s like piccalilli with attitude. And, of course, there is the sambal itself, a mess of tomato, chilli and funky dried shrimp which demands to be smeared on everything in reach – including your close friends.
Naturally, the laksa itself is based on yet another blitz of heat and aromatics. For years a good laksa was a rare thing in London. I used to go to a now long-gone Chinese restaurant, with a few Malaysian dishes, in Clerkenwell. Theirs was a Singapore laksa, a huge bowl of rust- coloured liquor with a powerful chilli kick softened by coconut milk, full of noodles and shrimp, chicken and fish balls, and slicked with chilli oil. I used to lose myself in its depths and stain my shirts.
But that’s only one kind. There are versions fully deserving of the name from Malaysia to Indonesia and beyond. Some have coconut milk; some do not. Some are sour and some are sweet. Another laksa pop-up which I have mentioned before but not tried, the Laksa Kitchen in Kentish Town – open only at weekends – specifies its regionality, as does the great C & R Café down Rupert Court off London’s Chinatown.
Sambal Shiok merely names it a laksa, but I’m going to call it for Singapore. It has all the soft coconut-milk tones I associate with those. There are two sorts of noodles, both egg and rice, plus hunks of tofu, tight skinned outside, soft inside. There are prawns and pieces of chicken. The menu rather grandly insists that it is served SUPER SPICY, not only in caps but in red, too, as if it’s some clumsy health and safety warning. It is no more challenging than any other I have tried, but boy, is it good. The broth is thick, making it more a stew than a soup. It is the Fisher-Price Activity Centre of food, with just so much to see and do and touch and poke. As indeed it needs to be because at £12 for the special, it is that tiresome quid or two more expensive than others. The most expensive at Laksa Kitchen is £10.50. At C & R it’s just £6.50.
I feel the same about the rice plates. Their version of beef rendang is exceptionally good, the meat long and slow cooked, and then allowed to get dry and sticky in the pan until the spices and the caramelised meat have become a tangle of intensity. And sure, it’s properly accessorised: coconut rice, a dollop of shrimp sambal, peanuts and pickles. But £12 is going it some. At C & R it’s £7.
Still the airy, white space this pop-up occupies, an Italian café by day serving gnocchi and the like, is very comfortable. There’s a charming front-of-house team, and a short but reasonable wine list. They have just one dessert, a soft and springy chocolate and cardamom cake served with a condiment which is a work of genius: condensed milk whipped up with Greek yogurt, the two ingredients soothing the harsher aspects of each other. If anybody out there already knew about this, why the hell didn’t they tell me?
It’s obvious what happens next to Sambal Shiok. Having moved inside from the street, they’ll be hunting for a permanent site. Right now, though, they’re summer stock, putting the show on, right here in the barn. It’s powerful, satisfying and for me at least, the very stuff of memories.
Jay’s news bites
It’s not long since I reviewed Shoreditch Thai restaurant Som Saa, but as they followed the path Sambal Shiok are now on – from pop-up to permanent – they’re worth referencing again. Plus, the food is so blisteringly good, you need to know about it: duck soup with depths, a salted beef cheek curry full of sweet, dark flavours, deep-fried fish nestling in aromatic herbs and fresh chillies. I could eat it all again.
More pop-up news: London’s crowded ramen market is getting more crowded. From Monday, for six months, the upstairs floor of Shuang Shuang, the Chinese hot pot place on London’s Shaftesbury Avenue, is being taken over by Yamagoya, one of the big names in the business, direct from Japan, founded in 1969. The menu will feature their apparently famed yuzu-flavoured broth.
Eye-roll of the week. A cat food company has launched a premium range aimed at ‘celebrities and insanely rich people’. The product includes Alaskan salmon and Norfolk lobster and retails at £125 per kilo. And no, I won’t play their game and name them.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
