Everest Curry King, 24 Loampit Hill, London SE13 7SW (020 8691 2233). Rolls and patties £1-£2.50, curries, stir fries and filled dosa £7.95-£11.95, sweets (six pieces) £6.95-£8.95
At Everest Curry King in Lewisham, they serve a beetroot curry that should silence even the most intimate of conversations. It’s not just the colour which, courtesy of the star ingredient, suggests a busy day down the abattoir, a neat trick for a vegetable rightly beloved of vegans. There’s the texture, which has both bite and softness, and the sweet-savoury depths that come when liberal spicing and coconut milk are cooked down together. It has an all-engrossing, soothing power. That describes so much of the food on offer here in a restaurant with a name that speaks of Nepal, but which mostly serves the dishes of Sri Lanka and south India more than 1,500 miles away to the south.
Getting to eat this beetroot curry was a product of frustrating but, as it turned out, happy circumstance, although not for everyone. Today, you are meant to be reading about an intriguing nose-to-tail fish restaurant in Northern Ireland. In time you will. Unfortunately, within a couple of days of me eating there, they closed temporarily for a refurbishment. We couldn’t get in to take our lovely photographs. These things happen.
I needed an emergency review and fell upon Rambutan, the much talked about Sri Lankan restaurant of chef Cynthia Shanmugalingam in London’s Borough Market. Rambutan is the restaurant of the book, which is to say the award-winning cookbook came first, and if the restaurant is anything like it, oh boy. It’s not just a collection of recipes, although those are diverting enough: for black pork belly curry and crunchy fried potatoes with turmeric, for coconut dal with kale, prawn curry with tamarind and so much more. It’s also an exquisitely illustrated journey across the culture and history of Sri Lanka, via its food. It is a song of coconut and sambols, of tempered spices, fresh curry leaves and fruit with salt and chilli. Having explored the book, I was eager to explore the restaurant. At short notice I had a table booked for a late lunch. And then, an hour before, they texted. The restaurant had been flooded by a storm. It was closed and lunch was cancelled. Sorry.
I was now on deadline. It was my companion, the chef and writer Tim Anderson, who suggested we divert to Everest Curry King, not far from where he lives. It would, he said, be a very different take on Sri Lankan food. It had also been recommended to me over the years by a number of fellow south Londoners. It’s a simple place, they said, but oh so good. And now, after a mad dash across London, and a stroll past all the emerging tower blocks around Lewisham station, here I am.
Everest Curry King was opened by the Sivarajah family just over 20 years ago to serve the local Sri Lankan community and is, basically, a takeaway with a few tables attached. There are glass-fronted cabinets stacked with metal trays filled in turn with vivid-coloured curries and stews, and more trays heaving with patties and rolls made with the flakiest of pastries, stained turmeric-yellow. Another counter is filled with bhajis and rotis and rainbow-coloured Indian sweets. On a counter behind is a bank of microwaves. The hard work building the layers of tempered spice in these dishes took place hours ago. The microwaves finish the job.
On this weekday lunchtime, a queue of eager locals has quickly built up. One person tells me she comes here from Greenwich. Another says it’s the best thing about living in Lewisham. I won’t argue. Certainly, the appeal is obvious. The menu on the wall lists dishes to eat in at between £7.95 and £11.95 and portions are large. Expect not to pay very much at all, for really quite a lot. Our lunch is underpinned by a huge platter of golden grained, boldly spiced biryani, containing hunks of tender bone-in chicken, hard-boiled eggs, crisply fried fresh curry leaves and ribbons of red pepper. It is the base upon which everything else will lie.
There is that beetroot curry, and another of aubergine, which has been gently fried down until it has a rich, toffee-like quality, and a third of shredded cabbage with a fine sour edge. There are two mutton curries on offer, one spicy, one less so. Both are the good dark brown stews. They bellow of ingredients that have hung about in each other’s company for a long time, until the meat is almost becoming a part of the gravy. We have the spicy version. It is not a heat which slaps you about the chops straight away. It builds, until you suddenly clock that your cheeks are slicked lightly with sweat.
There are crisp-shelled mutton rolls, filled with more tender meat and spiced potato, and fish and vegetable patties bound in a flaky pastry that spill crumbs down your front. These are the snacks of so many gods. Alongside the offer of vegetable curry-filled dosa, those wondrous crêpes made from a fermented rice flour batter, they also have rust-coloured string hoppers or idiyappam. These are soothing spirals of steamed rice flour noodle which come with sothi, a rich coconut milk broth. You dunk one into the other. It’s a meditative and engrossing process. Add a little of their sambal of coarsely grated coconut.
By now our table is full, as are we. This lot has cost us £35 and it’s clear some of it will need to be boxed up for the journey home. There is just space to try the sweet chilli prawns from a selection of deep red stir-fries, digging into the popularity of Indo-Chinese dishes. Everest is unlicensed, but there’s a fridge full of unfamiliar soft drinks, including King Coconut, a sweet coconut water with a light salty edge and Masala Jeera, a soda made, as the name suggests, with cumin. Apparently, it’s designed to aid digestion. It will leave you happily burping the rich aromatics of your spice cupboard. We get boxes of sweets to take away. Everest Curry King is a business built to serve a specific community. It does that job so well it has become a favourite among many other people, too. I have every sympathy for Rambutan, flooded out by a cloudburst. Do get hold of the book, then perhaps try the restaurant. But I can’t pretend. I’m delighted that the wretched flood resulted in me finding my way to this beetroot curry.
News bites
The chef Alexis Gauthier, who took his eponymous high-end restaurant in Soho entirely vegan a few years ago, is expanding. Next month he is opening two restaurants in a space on London’s Tottenham Court Road. 123V Bakery is a vegan café serving baked goods and rustic salads and various lunch items. It is a continuation of the idea first trialled in the department store Fenwick in 2021. Meanwhile Studio Gauthier will, like Gauthier in Soho, serve a vegan tasting menu, although it will, he says, be a little more relaxed than the mothership. At 123vegan.co.uk.
While there’s clearly a lot of gloomy news around the hospitality sector right now, there are still people who see it as a worthwhile investment. Restaurant company MJMK, which is behind both Kol and Lisboeta and has the peri peri chicken group Casa do Frango, has announced it has exceeded its recent £1m crowdfunding target. The cash will be used to open a second Kol and a fourth Casa do Frango. At the same time the Rosa’s Thai brand, which has 33 sites across England and Wales, has secured £10m of funding for expansion.
Livia Alarcon, former head chef at Maray in Liverpool, and head chef at Queen’s bistro in the city when I reviewed it so approvingly, is now in charge of her own restaurant. La Bistrotheque, inside Liverpool’s Baltic Market, is described as a European bistro. The menu includes popcorn mussels with salt and vinegar, a rosti with creamed spinach and chimichurri and a duck confit and peppercorn choux bun. See balticmarket.co.uk.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
