The Greyhound Café, 37 Berners Street, London W1T 3LZ (020 3026 3798). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £50 to £90
You probably think this restaurant reviewing lark is all truffles, Krug and duck fat, liberally smeared in crevices, as directed. And obviously there is a fair bit of that. We are consenting adults. But sometimes you have to fight for your lunch. One new restaurant phones to cancel my pseudonymous booking because, hilariously, they’ve forgotten it’s press night and they won’t be serving “ordinary” customers. OK. I won’t come then. We call another that I’ve finished writing about, to arrange photography. They tell us they’ve closed for refurbishment and will be reopening soon with a completely different menu. It’s a bullet dodged; I had to wash the blood off my hands after writing that review. No matter. I’ll get back to both of them eventually.
Time for an emergency review, then, with the fear that it will be like an emergency appendectomy only with less blood loss and more glassware. Happily, I land in the Greyhound Café, the first British outpost of a well-known Bangkok group, which has just opened on a hard-edged corner site north of London’s Oxford Street. Two thoughts occur to me, very quickly. The first is that I like this place: I like the buzz. I like the food, very much. I adore the menu, by which I mean the object. It’s a large format magazine, heat-set on textured paper and reminds me of the very best of 1990s print design, when a mag was a brilliant canvas for typography, images and wow. It’s a menu with food photographs and very lovely they are, too.
The other thought is that lots of people will hate this place on principle, because they think it will make them sound worldly and clever. They’ll tell you that they’ve been to Thailand and, as everybody knows, the best Thai food is sold for buttons from street stalls by gap-toothed old ladies who clean their pans by wiping them with the hem of their dresses, not from tidy, buzzy cafés like this. And what’s a little botulism among friends? I find it jolly cleansing, actually.
They’ll roll their eyes at any hint from the kitchen of what they dismiss as fusion. London’s chefs may be allowed to screw wilfully with the global larder, but God forbid anybody from Thailand should dare do such a thing. They should have the good sense to stay in their culinary box. And then some arse, with a meagre grasp of economics, will look at the prices and ask why it’s all so much more expensive here than in Thailand. Some of us will want to shout “because London’s rents, rates and wages are much higher than those in Bangkok, you complete numpty”, but you might as well waste your breath trying to teach Katie Hopkins basic humanity for all that it will benefit you.
Part of the issue is that Thai food in London has, in the past couple of years, been taken over by a bunch of British-born cooks, many with beards, who brought back a few things they learnt on their holidays. Nothing wrong with that in principle. I love the punch and vibrancy of Som Saa and have swooned like so many others over the brown crab meat and pork noodles at Kiln. Other places have been clumsy. Spraying everything with lime juice is not a substitute for ideas. Still, it sometimes feels like London’s non-Thai chefs have set out to rescue Thai food from itself. They can stop now. The Greyhound Café suggests Thai food is fine.
There’s a bowl of still warm cashews and peanuts, oily from their dry pan roasting, with fish-slab funky crisp-dried shrimp and friable Thai basil leaves to nibble on as we work to put together a meal. The three region khao tung is as good a place to start as any: rice crackers alongside three bowls of the good stuff to dip them in. There’s a beef massamun in a deep broth heavy with roasted spice and coconut, a long-cooked curry of richly sauced ground pork and a larb of finely diced mushrooms dressed with lime juice, fish sauce and lots of chillies. Satay of rib-eye is a generous portion of extremely tender beef for £7.80, smoky and seared in all the right places, with a dish of a powerful, chilli-boosted peanut sauce to dredge it through.
Some of the dish names here are a little overworked. Complicated Noodles sounds like it’s getting its apology in first. You get a toolbox of ingredients – rice noodle sheets, iceberg lettuce, minced pork and so on – and put the whole thing together yourself. It does sound like a lot of admin. Bangkok Bruschetta is a load of pork larb on toast, not an invitation to fume at the inauthentic.
We go instead for a slow-cooked herb garden and vegetable broth, which is a Ronseal name for something that tastes like it cares about your welfare: a deep seafood soup, bobbing with fat prawns and vegetables ripped from the ground while still practically foetal. It’s both powerful and soothing. From the side of the menu costed in the teens come pearly flakes of poached cod, drenched in chilli, lime and fish sauce on a vibrant Asian take on sauerkraut. Finally, we have a scallop pad Thai, which is generous with the shellfish, as it should be for £15.50. By the time we get to it, the noodles have seized up a little. A squeeze of fresh lime and a poke around and it all gets moving. It’s the Fisher-Price Activity Centre of dishes: what happens if I push this up against that against this? The answer is, lots.
For dessert there’s a dried chilli brownie which needs no explanation, save to say it’s a very passable brownie, which delivers a whack of fire once the sweetness of the chocolate has died away. A young coconut crêpe cake, the pancakes layered with heaps of sweetened whipped cream, is a study in white. If you are dealing with chilli burn, the dairy fats will sort it. Most importantly I am left thinking there are things here I want to come back for, like the Happy Toast. It’s topped with, among other things, salted caramel sauce and condensed milk. This reads like filthy late night drunk food, given a thin patina of respectability because you didn’t make it from your own fridge at three in the morning. Any place with that sort of thing on the menu surely deserves our deep respect. Frankly I’m delighted the other two reviews fell apart on me.
Jay’s news bites
For more Asian café fun, head to C & R, a Malaysian restaurant hidden in Rupert Court in Soho. Queues build up quickly for the generous platefuls of punchy, vivid food. In these winter months of illness, their laksas – both Singapore and Penang Asam – are a restorative and a steal at £6.50 for a heaving a bowl of broth, noodles
and seafood. Do not miss their beef rendang (cnrrestaurant.com).
The team behind the Polpo chain have signed a deal to expand their Spuntino restaurant in Soho – think sliders, buttermilk fried chicken and mac n’ cheese – into airports across the country. Takeaways will help banish the misery of inflight food. The first concession should open this year (spuntino.co.uk).
Recent discovery: the smoked salmon from Manchester Smoke House (not to be confused with the American BBQ restaurant of a similar name). Many mourned the closure of the Titanic Jewish Deli. This company produces the salmon that was once sold there (themanchestersmokehouse.co.uk).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
