Seveni Bar and Restaurant, 82 Kennington Road, London SE11 6NL (020 3795 9921). Skewers £1.40 - £5.50. Starters £5.50 - £7.50. Main dishes £8.80 -£18. BBQ minimum spend £35
I come across the restaurants I review in many different ways: through sniffing the smoke-cured air in city streets, or stopping hopefully in front of menus in windows; through clicking bravely on links fired at me in emails and scanning press releases for words of promise. I came across Seveni, opposite the Imperial War Museum in south London, because I drove past it at night and it looked bonkers. It occupies a one-storey, many-sided space at the bottom of a neo-brutalist tower block like some geological outcrop. Through the plateglass windows can be glimpsed a low ceiling hung with twinkling, white Club Tropicana fairy lights. A series of hoses of the sort Noo-Noo had for a nose in Teletubbies appear to dangle from the edges of the ceiling.
For a while this space was occupied by a Turkish restaurant to which, I admit, I paid little attention. Now, a web search told me, it has been taken over by a Chinese restaurant with a four-pronged approach. For the most part the kitchen interrogates the food of the country’s northeast and comes back with very good answers: that’s barbecue, things on skewers, Sichuan dishes and hotpot (which they ascribe to Beijing). The menu, when viewed online, is a cacophony of small print and “look over here” sections.
There’s a very long list of those things on skewers, including beef tendon, aorta, tongue and tripe. There is chicken heart and chicken bone, pork intestine and lamb brain. Choose wisely and you could put together your own skewered cockentrice. I have no idea what “back straps” are and didn’t ask. Items K50 and K51 are in Chinese with no translation. I’m meant to be cross about this outbreak of exclusiveness, but I already knew there were things described in a language I did understand, that I wasn’t going near. Getting bolshie about things in a language I didn’t understand would be silly.
That said, going to Seveni without a sense of adventure is missing the point. You even get to cross a tiny wooden fairytale bridge as you enter the dining room. Under that ceiling of fairy lights. It’s like the Singing Ringing Tree, only with an awful lot more chilli and less German. (Stop looking baffled; search YouTube. You’ll thank me.) Mostly, I advise you to go as I did: mob-handed, because if there’s only two or three of you at the table, you’ll struggle to order enough to make sense of the possibilities. And make sure to book one of the BBQ tables, over which hang those Noo-Noo hoses to suck up the smoke. Thrillingly, instead of the usual electric hot plate, the barbecues are powered by cauldrons of burning charcoal, delivered gingerly to the table. There is a minimum charge of £35 per barbecue pit, but that gets you a lot. We used two for the nine of us.
Frankly it’s all as larky and boisterous inside as it looks from the outside. Most of the tables are filled with Chinese groups. We’re meant to nod sagely at this, but it’s not necessarily a good sign. Sometimes people just like the comfort of crowds. I can point you at terrible Chinese restaurants full of delighted Chinese people. But the ones here do know what to do with all the kit and, given the fun we ended up having, I’d say following this crowd is a good idea. On one table there’s a metre-high transparent cylinder with a tap for dispensing tea. On another, there’s a device which fits over the barbecue pit, which we’re told is to knock up a kind of omelette. A third table is lost behind a hotpot’s cloud of steam: chicken stock one side, something spicier the other.
I attempt to fashion from the menu a sequence in which the dishes should arrive. The waiter smiles sweetly and agrees to my plan. The kitchen then just throws everything at us. Don’t worry. The raw platters for the barbecue can sit on a little wooden trolley at the end of the table, awaiting their moment. What defines the experience is a vibrant, rust-coloured spice mix of cumin, ground chilli, salt and sugar. It’s what stops the barbecue from mimicking the Korean variety and geographically places it elsewhere.
Hot nuggets of skewered lamb arrive pelted with it, as do sizeable, butterflied king prawns. It’s even on cylinders of rice cake, which look like those bungs of polystyrene used to protect fragile goods in transit. They take a char nicely and bounce pleasingly between the teeth. I am intrigued by how they might get lambs’ brains on to a skewer without them falling apart, so place an order. They don’t get them on to a skewer. The nuggets turn up in a chilli broth with bamboo shoots, looking exactly like pieces of brain. They are soft and soothing.
For the barbecue we have platters of king oyster and enoki mushroom, the strands curling in the heat. There are corn cobs and more rice cakes. This cookery works just as well for non-meat items as it does for the animal. There are ovals of rib eye and scored pieces of pre-seasoned pork belly just waiting to be seared. We pull at our skewers, play with the barbecue and sprinkle on the glorious, uncompromising fairy dust of chilli and cumin.
From the Sichuan menu we get fragments of deep-fried chicken, hidden in a heap of red chillies, which provide an earthiness rather than just heat. You get to go on a treasure hunt in search of prime bird. There is quick-fried pig kidney in a mess of sauce and strands of shredded potato, still with a little bite, with yet more dried chillies. There is a dish described as stir-fried Chinese chive with egg. In truth it’s the other way round, which is to say a big, billowy plate piled with the most savoury of herb-flecked scrambled eggs. It’s a breakfast dish for someone in need of a wake-up. Only thick squid tentacles, in another of those big, slumpy red-brown chilli sauces, doesn’t do it for us. It’s all just a bit rubbery.
But mostly it’s just an awful lot of noisy, elbows-out, “Pass-me-a-napkin”, “Yes-I’ll-have-another-beer”, “What-the-hell-is-that?”, “Don’t-eat-the-chilies”, “Who-wants-to-try-the-lambs’-brains?” fun. I won’t pretend. That view from the outside is seriously intimidating. It’s reasonable to stare through those windows and wonder whether you’ll ever fit in. I advise you to be brave and walk through the door.
News bites
Blackpool’s Wok Inn Seaside Noodle Bar draws on the Cantonese tradition that’s dominated Britain’s Chinese restaurants for decades; their glazed spare ribs are glorious. But there’s much more to thrill here from across Asia. Try the beef rendang, the massaman and, in particular, the flaky roti canai that come with them. Do try the salt and chilli duck tongues, too (michaelwanswokinn.co.uk).
A new restaurant crowdfunder has launched on Kickstarter, courtesy of Christian Stevenson, the Youtuber AKA DJ BBQ. Stevenson, who has run a mobile operation at festivals since 2012, plans to open a BBQ restaurant with a wood-fired oven for pizzas, in Woodbridge, Suffolk. He hopes to raise £75,000.
Meanwhile Gary Usher, who has been one of the most convincing champions of crowdfunded restaurants, has announced his next plan: an outpost on the other side of the Pennines in Leeds. Having just completed a £100,000 crowdfunder for Kala in Manchester, he has launched an Instagram account for Wagon House Bistro, due to open in 2020
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
