Speedboat Bar, 30 Rupert Street, London W1D 6DL. Snacks £5-£12.50, salads, stir-fries £10-£14, curries, specials £12-£25, dessert £8, cocktails £7.50-£10, wines from £30
The restaurant at 30 Rupert Street, on the edge of London’s Chinatown, was once one of the most beautiful in the city. Now it’s one of the most dynamic. As Xu, a Taiwanese-style tea house, it was a stage set of 1920s polish and clean lines. The walls were part-panelled in block marquetry, and there were booths upholstered in leather the colour of café au lait. There were sexy wall sconces, and flashes of marble trim and tiny private dining rooms built cleverly into the small space. You came here for crisply fried pork buns and pleated dumplings in puddles of jade-green broth.
It was at first shocking to see all of that stripped out to make way for Speedboat Bar. Now the downstairs walls are tiled in an institutional sludge green. Upstairs they’re painted yellow against the turquoise window frames. There’s a pool table to drink powerful cocktails over while you play, and giant TVs screening sports. There are stainless-steel tables and dozens of tiny pictures of Bangkok street life, as if acquired over decades of trade rather than put up for the opening a couple of months ago. And oh, the clamour. Top marks for upholstering the underneath of the tables, to help deaden the sound.
An 80s soundtrack of Depeche Mode and Soft Cell accompanies the delivery of whisky sodas and King Kushti lager by the bottle. I order a bowl of deep-fried chicken skins, the brown of a velour sofa. They are still warm and curled in on each other and an irresistible salty-sour. As I scarf the lot, I finally clock that this new space is just as clever and just as beguiling an exercise in restaurant stage-setting as its previous incarnation.
This makes sense. The restaurant may have changed but the business behind it remains the same. Both involved the Sethi brothers’ company JKS Restaurants. They have an impressive spread of ventures, from the Mayfair Indian Gymkhana, through the Iranian kebab house Berenjak, to the Bao group, of which the now closed Xu was a part. JKS has many talents. One of them is choosing their chef-restaurateur partners. With Speedboat Bar it’s the British chef Luke Farrell, who has been bouncing back and forth between Dorset, London and Thailand for many years now, investigating southern Thai cooking. He brings in cuttings of Thai herbs and plants to grow here in glasshouses on his father’s farm, because they are diminished by being imported frozen.
The first restaurant he opened with JKS was Plaza Khao Gaeng, a southern Thai café in the upstairs space above their Arcade food court at the base of Centrepoint. There, he serves fierce dishes of dry-fried pork or sea bream with permutations of chillies, wild galangal and makrut limes. It’s food to make you gasp and blink and go back for more. Farrell has described Speedboat Bar as his tribute to the full-on cafés along the neon-gilded Yaowarat Road in Bangkok’s Chinatown. Everything here is vivid and candy-coloured and maximum wattage, including the food. Look at the bright orange sweet-sour dipping sauce with the sweetcorn fritters, the golden lacy batter pitted with the brilliant yellow of corn kernels. Or there’s the ludicrously green prawn ceviche, served whole and peeled, apart from the tail, which can act as a handle. Use it to help you dredge the prawn through the rugged lake of lime, chilli and fish sauce that makes your lips tingle and your brow sweat.
Speedboat’s homage to the restaurants of Bangkok’s Chinatown is felt in various ways. A salad of pickled mustard greens comes layered with slices of dense, deep-red, wind-dried Chinese sausage. Drunkard’s seafood and beef noodles is so named, our Thai waiter explains, because it was first devised as a hangover cure from whatever was hanging around in the fridge. It’s a good reason to get liquored up. There are broad ribbon noodles and slices of quick-fried beef and curls of squid in a thickened sweet soy Cantonese-style sauce. If you’re with non-meat eaters, watch out for the Naem fried rice, mined with tiny cubes of pork. Introduce some of the sweet, vinegary dressing from the saucer on the side. Allow sliced red and green chillies according to taste.
Other things come from the more obviously Thai side of the ledger. Clams, steamed open in their shells for maximum suckage, arrive in a broth thick with sweet chilli jam and outrageously blousy, aromatic Thai basil. Chunks of aubergine, served in a similar sauce, are cooked down until their skins are crinkled and their flesh creamy. A crispy pork curry walks both sides of the line. The sliced meat has crackling with the crunch and shatter that I associate with Cantonese roast meats. The dark brown sauce has the coconut and palm sugar sweetness that I associate with a massaman.
Taken dish by dish, it’s obviously huge fun. To keep to the retro 60s vibe, each one is like a frame from an old Batman comic fight scene: Kapow! Wham! Biff! The problem is that cumulatively, like the bar upstairs throbbing and thronging with young people necking those whisky sodas, it can all become a little relentless. Wave after wave of sweet and fiery and sour crashes on the wilder shores of your tongue. This may, however, be down to the nature of reviewing, which demands over-ordering, for I am nothing if not conscientious. Perhaps come here for a beer and just a couple of plates and then move on. Outside is a roped-off area of the pavement with red plastic stools around the tables. On warm summer nights, people passing by will want to be inside that rope rather than outside.
There is just one dessert, a flaky golden rectangle of deep-fried pineapple pie. It reminds me fondly of a McDonald’s apple pie. It’s in keeping with the louche, laid-back mood. If you want something else, remember, you’re in Soho. There are dessert alternatives.
Speedboat Bar sits alongside places like Kiln, Som Saa and the now- closed District in Manchester; restaurants created by British chefs with a deep fascination with Thai traditions. They are not a replacement for restaurants like the recently reviewed Thai-run Supawan. Big cities have space for many things. When presented with the vivacity of Speedboat Bar, the style is completely irresistible.
News bites
The Manchester-born chain Rudy’s Pizza Napoletana, which has opened over a dozen sites across the UK since its 2015 launch in Ancoats, has announced a new 8,000 sq ft outpost on Portland Street in the city. As well as space for 120 diners it will be home to Rudy’s Pizza Academy, a training school in the craft of pizza, and an interesting response to a shortage of kitchen staff across the hospitality business. It will also house the Rudy’s Bake at Home business, which will make their pizzas available across much of the UK from later in the spring. At rudyspizza.co.uk.
Leamington Spa is to get a new Greek restaurant, born out of a lockdown business. During the pandemic Matt and Alex Crowther, who run the Pugs Pub business in and around the Warwickshire town, launched a Greek food delivery service, based on Matt Crowther’s four years of experience working in Greece. That has now spawned Taverna Meraki, on the site of what was a Café Rouge. It will open towards the end of May. Visit tavernameraki.com.
And sad but perhaps inevitable news from Edinburgh. Following the sudden death in December of the much-admired chef Paul Kitching, his restaurant 21212 is to close. ‘The passing of Paul has devastated all the team and the passion that runs through every fibre of the restaurant is not as evident as it was when he was alive,’ his partner Katie O’Brian told industry journal The Caterer. ‘To us that is unacceptable to his memory.’
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
