Bugis Street Brasserie, Millennium Gloucester Hotel, London SW7 4LH (020 7331 6211). Soups and starters £5.50-£9; mains £8.50-£17; desserts £6; wines from £18
Good things can come from bad. The bad thing in this case was the hopeful but inevitably hopeless trip I made a couple of weeks ago to the Holiday Inn on London’s Cromwell Road. I went for dinner, a word I’d put inside quotation marks to indicate irony, if the whole damn thing hadn’t traumatised the wryness out of me. To recap, I was invited by the executive chef and thought it would be rude to decline; as it turned out, it would have been nowhere near as rude as the boiled egg they served as part of a caesar salad, which had a Shrek-green ring around the yolk through overboiling.
I mentioned that the hotel is favoured by cabin crew from Singapore Airlines. One commenter insisted that not all hotel restaurants had to be this way; he said I should try the Bugis Street Brasserie at the nearby Millennium Gloucester Hotel, because that’s where all those Singapore Airlines cabin crew go for a fix of home. It’s named after a key food street in the city state. I have long been suspicious of the notion that you should follow specific ethnic groups to find the good stuff. I have wasted too much money in terrible Chinese restaurants serving gnarly bits of meat harvested from animals that clearly died of old age in cornflour-thickened, viciously over-sweetened sauces just because they happened to be full of Chinese people. Sometimes particular groups cluster in certain places more because it’s a social hub than because the kitchen downstairs has a deft way with the classics.
Still, I am forever a starry-eyed optimist. Plus, I have a taste, verging on the obsessive, for a good Singapore laksa, that generous coconut milk-thickened, chilli-slicked broth, stacked with noodles, seafood, chicken and various other bits and bobs, which make life worth living. If there was the possibility of one of those in my future, Bugis Street demanded my attention.
The Millennium Gloucester is a beautiful piece of architecture, if your idea of beauty extends to Stalinist-era pre-stressed grey concrete monoliths of the sort built to house sound-proofed interrogation centres. No matter. I was planning to be inside it, eating, rather than outside squinting at the facade. The restaurant is reached by its own entrance around the corner from the hotel’s main door. It was only when I wandered round there that I clocked its location literally behind the Holiday Inn, for those cabin crew in desperate need of sanctuary.
It’s the right place to seek it, though not because of the room. It is a masterful study in beige. Ceiling fans beat unnecessarily at the cool air of a London summer to summon up a tropical vibe, and there are wooden slatted screens on some of the windows. Ignore this. All the colour and drama will be on the table in front of you.
It starts with their chicken satay. These are not the compressed cysts of tortured animal protein impaled on cocktail sticks and dyed yellow that fester in supermarket chiller cabinets across the land. These are smoky pieces of heavily spice-rubbed thigh, the occasional tassels of skin fired to crisp on the grill. There are singed bits and golden bits and roasted bits. With them is the requisite sauce that hits you first with the sweetness of peanut, but which keeps going with layers of spice and aromatics. At first you try to be refined, dipping the chicken in the sauce daintily. Then you take to dragging it through the bowl enthusiastically. Finally, you’re leaving the pieces of chicken on the plate and spooning the sauce over the top. There are, as there should be, cooling pieces of cucumber to settle everything down.
From the list headed “Bugis Signatures” comes the classic nasi goreng, a huge plate of rust-coloured rice, mined with spiced chicken, prawns and a few peas for colour and pop, then topped with a fried egg, the yolk from which is just waiting to be pierced. With it comes a deep red sambal with huge toasted chilli notes with which to lubricate the rice and bring out the odd bead of sweat.
And then, of course, there is the laksa. Oh, the laksa. If, like me, you have a mental laksa map, a geographical plotting of the best places for the dish, drop a pin for this one. The thicker rice noodles take me by surprise; I’m used to thinner vermicelli, but these have a satisfying slurp. The broth is not overly sweetened. It’s a huge bash of chilli and stock and coconut. It bobs with prawns that have the bite of seafood cooked through only in the hot broth once it hit the bowl. I slurp and sip and dig about very happily.
Singapore has long been a culinary crossroads, with ethnic groups being washed ashore in waves and bringing with them their food. So here is a terrifying-looking Malaysian chicken curry made with thigh served on the bone, in a bright red liquor beneath a surface puddle of orange oil perhaps half a centimetre deep. I worry it will be grim and greasy to eat, but it’s nothing of the sort. The pungent gravy seems to emulsify as it gets in your bowl. We have Nyonya pork, in a dark sauce full of cracked black pepper and sweet chilli. From a list of specials awaiting us on the table come chunks of long-braised pork belly, with jelly-like fat, served in a clay pot that’s so hot, the black sauce is still bubbling and spitting at us when it lands. It is a dish for which the words “yes please” were invented.
The picture-led dessert menu offers a bunch of slightly worrying things, involving slippery bean curd or sweetened red-bean paste. We retreat to the safety of banana fritters in a palm sugar syrup. It’s unneeded and all the better for that. We drink very little, but there are beers and solid-looking wines for those who want them. Most dishes are priced from around a tenner and into the low teens, alongside set menu options for £12. It’s the sort of place where people come alone at lunchtime for a single plate of good food, and feel very comfortable doing so. If it were relevant, I might tell you it’s packed with people from South East Asia. That happens to be so. But it’s far more useful to know that its true claim on your attention goes far beyond simply being better than the Holiday Inn across the road.
News bites
The Greyhound Café, the first London branch of a well-known Bangkok group, offers a sprightly, expansive take on the Thai repertoire. The dish names can be a little tiresome – there’s Salmon in Hot Pursuit, Bugs in My Salad, and Angry Pasta – but it’s all worth your time. The German style pork knuckle with a kicking tamarind curry paste is a standout, as is the Tom Yum soup with tiger prawns and prawn-stuffed dumplings.
The Stockport Produce Hall, a site for various street food-style stands, has been criticised for not including enough independent traders in its repertoire, in favour of large-scale restaurant brands. Now they’ve announced that the brilliant Cambodian restaurant Angkor Soul from nearby Marple, will, have a presence there from this month.
And on a similar subject Market Halls, which already operates ‘multi-vendor’ food courts in London’s Fulham and Victoria has received £20 million of backing from equity firm Bridgepoint Growth, to roll the model out across the country. If the street food movement was once to the restaurant business what indie record labels once were to the majors, that moment appears to be passing.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
