Restaurant review: Lucky Lychee, Winchester

On July 19, 2024February 18, 2025 By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

Even though Reading is my patch and always has been, I get asked for recommendations elsewhere fairly often. And my blog is more useful in that respect, I hope, than it used to be, with a number of reviews from beyond Berkshire and a series of European city guides you can consult to help with lunch, dinner or even coffee choices. I’m always encouraged when people tell me the city guides have come in handy: a friend told me a few weeks ago that she and her boyfriend were trying to pick somewhere for a holiday later in the year and she actually said “can’t we just go somewhere Edible Reading has been?” Few higher compliments exist.

Somewhat closer to home, I do like to have a few choice spots in my back pocket for the occasions when people ask for my help. If you want somewhere in London or Bristol, I can sort you out. Ditto Bath, Oxford, Exeter, even Swindon. But beyond that it gets sketchy. My last trips to Cardiff, Edinburgh and Glasgow were so long ago that I’d struggle to know what’s hot and what’s not these days; I could suggest somewhere, but it would be based on research rather than personal experience. And as for the likes of Manchester, Newcastle, Birmingham or Liverpool, forget it.

I’ve felt for a while, though, that Winchester was a gap in my repertoire that I ought to fix.

After all, it’s a lovely city, it’s a half hour train hop from Reading and it has plenty to do – excellent shopping, great coffee, good mooching opportunities, historic streets, pretty pubs and a gorgeous cathedral. For a long time my dining option of choice there was Michelin-starred pub the Black Rat, but the last time I went it really wasn’t great and when it subsequently lost its star I wasn’t hugely surprised. A couple of years ago it closed down, the owner citing spiralling energy bills.

And the last time I ate in Winchester it was at Rick Stein’s restaurant there, where I had a pleasant, well-mannered, expensive meal that felt a little like Hotel du Vin but ever so slightly better; Winchester has a Hotel du Vin of its own, which gives you some idea of the kind of place it is. But that was in January 2020, just before everything changed, and catching a whiffy, clapped-out Voyager train to Winchester last weekend I was struck that it had gone from being a city I knew moderately well to a passing acquaintance with whom I’d lost touch but was keen to reconnect.

I had a solo lunch reservation at Lucky Lychee, a restaurant which operated out of a Greene King pub called the Green Man, a fifteen minute walk from the train station and not far from the aforementioned Hotel du Vin. The brainchild of couple James Harris and Nicole Yeoh, it started out in street food and home delivery before getting a residency at another Winchester pub and then moving to the Green Man two years ago. Harris and Yeoh met in Malaysia, and their menu spans Malaysian, Thai and Chinese dishes.

I had discovered it through an Instagram post I stumbled on which was singing the praises of Lucky Lychee’s brunch roti wraps, a fusion of Malaysian and British food, and although the post was written by a person who used the word “sossidge”, there was something about the food that looked unmissable. Sometimes you can just look at a menu and suspect two things: first, that you’ll eat well, and secondly that you’ll find it impossible to decide exactly how you will eat well. Lucky Lychee’s menu was one of those, and I reached the front door of the pub with a heady blend of excitement and anticipation.

It helps that it’s such a handsome pub, all dark muted tones and wood panelling. The front room looked like a proper boozer, if a classy one, with high tables and sturdy leather-topped benches. Further through, near the fireplace, there were comfy booths and tastefully-upholstered sofas. But I was sat in what I imagine was the dining room, on a banquette, looking out on the whole thing, sunlight sneaking in through the windows. The table opposite me was occupied, with a couple making inroads into a tempting-looking lunch order, but otherwise it was pretty quiet. It was one o’clock on a Saturday not that far from payday. Had I made a mistake?

Not based on the looks of the menu, anyway. I actually think a weekend lunchtime might be the trickiest time to visit Lucky Lychee, because you have a selection of what are dubbed snacks but looked like starters and small plates, their lunch menu – a slimmed down version of their evening offering – and the brunch menu.

And that’s where it got really difficult. Because the lunch dishes – 8 hour rendang, tom yum king prawn fried rice and the like – looked extremely tempting. But it was the brunches that first drew me in and that selection was calling to me every bit as much. The idea of curry sausages and fennel cured smoked collar bacon, bound up in a flaky roti wrap with lime mayo and sweet chilli sauce sounded too good to miss. A great hangover cure too, and after a couple of bottles of red with my friend Jerry the night before it sounded just the ticket. What to do?

In the end I decided to postpone the decision by ordering snacks and seeing how I felt after that. But first I ordered a drink. Lucky Lychee boasts a fascinating range of low intervention wines, but postponing the hair of the dog for the time being I decided to try an iced Milo, allegedly a popular chocolate malt drink in Malaysia. It was nice enough, though the ice took some time to get the overall experience below lukewarm. Perhaps the glass was straight out of the dishwasher: either way, it may well have been thoroughly authentic but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d just spent four pounds fifty on a Nesquik.

That was the last – the only – misfire of the entire meal, and everything after that was so terrific as to render it insignificant. Chicken karaage was a decent portion for eight pounds fifty, and if it ever so slightly lacked crunch, the flavour that had permeated the chicken thighs, from soy, oyster sauce and rice wine, more than made up for it.

Mayo is a frequent accompaniment for karaage but rarely is it anywhere near as good as Lucky Lychee’s, which was positively awash with citrus. I kept going back and forward between this and my second small plate, trying to figure out which I liked the best.

I think though, on balance, the second small plate was ever better. Billed as Penang pork spring rolls it was really nothing of the kind. I mean, technically it was, but the ratio of dense, delicious meat to wafer-thin, greaseless pastry made it something closer to a sausage roll (or, if you’re three, “sossidge roll”) that was all sausage and no roll.

But that’s not all, because the meat was beautiful – shot through with tiny dice of carrot and, I think, spring onion. The menu said that it was marinated in a 10 spice powder and I could well believe it, because I’m not sure I’ve ever had anything like it.

I’m conscious that this is my third solo review in a row – and yes, I might be auditioning for some additional dining companions. It meant I ordered slightly more food than I strictly needed, to try and give the menu a fair run out. But I was as pleased as Punch not to have to share these spring rolls with any other fucker. They were mine and mine alone, and it was a beautiful moment.

My server, who was downright lovely throughout, gave me a little time after my starters were cleared to make my decision. As I mulled it over, I ordered a glass of white wine, a German riesling which turned out to have plenty of zip and pith, and a little honey. And the more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t decide: brunch or lunch? Buttery roti or something with rice?

It wasn’t easy but in the end, believe it or not, I was thinking of you lot. I decided you’d find an idea of Lucky Lychee’s dinner and lunch options more useful than a brunch, however good. So I forwent that roti stuffed with good things, and decided that if I walked away disappointed it was all your fault.

Gladly, nothing was your fault and my main course was one of the most enjoyable things I’ve eaten all year. Billed as honey Marmite chicken, it wasn’t a combination I’d ever considered or even heard of, although a Google suggests that it is indeed a dish eaten in China and Malaysia. But honestly, it was such a phenomenal combination. The chicken, thigh again, was in a crispy, craggy coating, studded with sesame seeds, and it had all the textural interest that the karaage had only just failed to bring to the table. But what made this dish, and made it one I’ve thought about many times since, was the sauce.

What a sauce! You might not like Marmite, you might not like honey – for what it’s worth I love both of them – but this sauce from Lucky Lychee managed to completely transcend either Marmite or honey, being infinitely more than the sum of those things. So you had the huge, salty savoury depth that came from the Marmite (and, apparently, a bit of oyster sauce) and the almost smoky sweetness from the honey, dovetailing and transforming in a way that was nothing less than magical.

Add in some just-cooked peppers and a sprinkling of peanuts and you had one of the most intensely moreish dishes I’ve eaten in well over a year. Put it this way – last month I ate at Kolae, one of the most hyped restaurants in London right now, and I had some of the most fascinating dishes I’ve sampled in a long old time. But nothing there matched the joyousness of this honey Marmite chicken.

I spooned, and then scraped, every last bit of sauce onto my fluffy jasmine rice, I cleaned my plate as best I could without abandoning decorum, and I wondered when I could eat this dish again. I love fried chicken, which ultimately this dish was, but I couldn’t remember trying anything quite like it.

By this point I was gratified to see that a few more people had taken tables in the pub. A young couple came in, him with a London Review Of Books canvas tote, her with one bearing the logo of Shakespeare & Co, the legendary bohemian Paris bookshop, and took the table near the window that had been occupied by others when I came in. I smiled at them – I’m not sure when I reached the age where I’m twinkly and avuncular, but sadly that point has come – and then I peeked nosily as they ordered from the brunch menu.

One of them had ordered a roti that was served absolutely stuffed with beef rendang, and as I saw it come to the table I realised there was nothing for it: I was just going to have to return, sooner rather than later. I realised my mistake hadn’t been to order lunch instead of brunch, it had been not to order brunch, find some excuse to loiter around Winchester for five hours and then go back for dinner. Never mind – I was already planning multiple return visits, with a pretty good idea of at least one person, miffed to have missed out on this trip, who would insist on trying it out.

Lucky Lychee does have a dessert menu, but on this occasion it didn’t have enough to tempt me. It’s mostly ice cream and affogato, with just two more interesting options – a banana spring roll and a piña colada crème brûlée. I had it mind to possibly grab an ice cream from Chococo, across town, so I decided to settle up and amble to Coffee Lab for a latte. My bill came to just under forty-eight pounds, not including tip. The most expensive thing I had was the honey Marmite chicken, which was under fifteen pounds. It would be hard, I think, to spend fifty pounds on lunch better than this.

As you’ve probably gathered, I truly adored Lucky Lychee. And weirdly, just as with Bombay Brothers last week, I came away feeling that I hadn’t seen the restaurant at its absolute best. With Bombay Brothers that was driven by a faint hope that surely it could be better than that, but with Lucky Lychee it was more an awareness that, phenomenal though my meal was, I suspected they were capable of even more.

I need to go back – to try the brunch menu, to work my way through the other snacks, the curry puffs and sesame prawn toasts, and to try the full gamut of their main courses at dinner time. Char siu with honey rhubarb glaze has my name on it, as does the Guinness chicken with lychees. And that rendang.

Who am I kidding? I want to try all of it – and rarely have I come away from a restaurant so simultaneously delighted with everything I had and frustrated that I wasn’t able to polish off more. The other thing I kept thinking was that this is a restaurant operating out of a Greene King pub. So I cast my mind over all of Reading’s Greene King pubs – the Roebuck, the Palmer Tavern, the Outlook and so on – and thought how sad it was that none of them had done anything this bold. Another one to chalk up under I wish Reading had something like this.

Don’t get me wrong, its closest equivalent is the Moderation, a fine pub. But Lucky Lychee was properly next level stuff. As so often, going away from Reading reminds you of the things Reading is still missing. Maybe we’ll get a top notch Malaysian restaurant at some point, but I’m not holding my breath. On the plus side, I now have somewhere to recommend whenever anybody asks me where’s good in Winchester. But this is the drawback: how am I ever going to review anywhere else in the city, if it means missing out on eating at Lucky Lychee?

Lucky Lychee – 9.0
The Green Man, 53 Southgate St, Winchester, SO23 9EH

https://www.luckylychee.uk

Restaurant review: Bombay Brothers

On July 12, 2024December 30, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews5 Comments

I’m grateful for every single one of my readers, but there’s a special place in my affections for people who tip me off about places. Whether it’s my West Reading mole who keeps me posted on the comings and goings of the Oxford Road, my town centre informant who sends me pictures of shuttered restaurants and “coming soon” advertisements, or my other half who is always telling me about new businesses I’ve never even heard of springing up on Instagram, they form an invaluable network helping me keep track of where I ought to try next. I’d compare them to the Baker Street Irregulars, except they’re all very much adults and their catchment area extends far beyond Baker Street.

In particular I very much appreciate people who get in touch to tell me to try somewhere out, whether it’s already on my list or not. When I review somewhere new, there are always a few people who come out of the woodwork to tell me they’ve been going there for ages and it’s great, but only a fraction of those people ever pop up in my DMs raving about the place before I’ve been.

Maybe they like to keep the good places to themselves, maybe they assume I’ll get to them before too long. Or perhaps it doesn’t even cross their minds to contact me, which is fair enough. But it means that when people do recommend somewhere, I’m always especially grateful.

This week’s review came from a message like that, from a reader of the blog who told me to try Bombay Brothers, the Indian restaurant on the ground floor of Kings Walk which opened around the beginning of last year. She specifically raved about Bombay Brothers’ railway lamb, saying it reminded her of the one her grandma used to make. I couldn’t turn my nose up at a recommendation like that, so on a dreary July evening I hopped on the bus into town to give it a whirl.

Restaurant review: Dough Bros

On July 5, 2024December 30, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews4 Comments

I moved house last week, and suddenly everything changed. My little slice of Reading, my walks, maps, routes and routines were no more. No more waking up in the Village and mooching into town for lunch, no more strolls round Reading Old Cemetery or Palmer Park, no more number 17s and Little Oranges buses, no more Retreat just round the corner. After seven years of East Reading life, it was time for something different.

So on moving day Zoë and I found ourselves standing, sleep-deprived, outside a large house that wasn’t quite ours yet, rented van parked up in the drive, waiting for the agent to arrive and check us in. Meanwhile, across town, movers were loading boxes into a far bigger van from a far smaller house that was no longer ours. The sun was blazing, and I strolled across Cintra Park to Greggs, of all places, to pick up coffee and pastries. This is my neighbourhood now, I thought to myself.

I’m writing this over a week later, after seven days of unpacking and tip slots and IKEA trips (I’d forgotten how depressing that place is) and everything is starting to take shape. A lot of the boxes are unpacked, the kitchen is in some kind of order and, best of all, we finally got a new bed – high off the ground, with a big firm mattress, like climbing on to a cloud at night. The walls are fresh-painted white, the blinds are new and Venetian and the rooms flood with summer sunlight.

And every morning I wake up and can’t quite believe I live here, in this new place.

There’s a clothes line in the garden, and I get to experience the meditative joys of hanging out the washing, taking it in when it’s been dried by the sun and smells of heaven. Let’s not talk about the huge rent hike, or the council tax band of this place, or the fact that I can’t afford to eat out quite so often: let’s just think about the smell of that washing from the line.

On our very first night, exhausted but with the rest of the week off to unpack and settle in, we wandered to pretty much our nearest restaurant, Kungfu Kitchen. Like me they moved recently, although a few doors down Christchurch Green maybe isn’t quite as big a shift as mine. And their new site is lovely and snazzy – especially the light feature projecting fish onto the floor – but it was also reassuring just how like their old place it was. The food was still outstanding, and the welcome was the same, because Jo and Steve do not change: I particularly enjoyed Jo frogmarching customers to the loo, proudly boasting that Kungfu Kitchen has the best toilets in the world. Her words, not mine.

But Kungfu Kitchen is only one of our nearest restaurants, and I popped into one of the others to take something home the following night, just before an England match, fresh from a purgatorial trip to the tip. Dough Bros opened in March at the top of Northumberland Avenue and has built up quite a following in three short months. It’s run by a couple of friends, one of whom also runs the neighbouring barber Short, Back & Vibes.

Bar review: Siren RG1

On June 28, 2024December 30, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews16 Comments

The closure of Pepe Sale last week – temporarily or permanently, nobody knows for sure – rounds off the most brutal six months I’ve ever experienced in covering Reading’s hospitality scene for over ten years. At every price point, with every kind of venue, whether your tastes are more Cici Noodle Bar or Coco Di Mama, the Lyndhurst or TGI Fridays we’ve seen unprecedented levels of closures in town. There will be bright spots ahead – I anticipate quite a lot of people celebrating on the fifth of July, for instance – but you wouldn’t bet against the second half of 2024 being as gruelling as the first.

Normally closures are a part of life in hospitality, and for nearly every one there’s an equal and opposite newcomer. But that‘s slowed to a trickle this year, with only three significant new venues opening in Reading so far. The first is Zia Lucia, on St Mary’s Butts, which I recently reviewed here. And the most recent, which opened literally this week, is the Rising Sun on Castle Street, a fancy-looking gastropub by Heartwood Inns, a group which also owns Brasserie Blanc. Given that we’ve lost the The Corn Stores and Bel and The Narrowboat already in 2024, it’s a bold move.

But the single biggest opening of the year – which would have been the biggest opening of nearly any year – is Siren RG1, Siren Craft’s keenly awaited town centre taproom on Friar Street which opened in May. It’s been in the pipeline for some time and its arrival has generated the kind of excitement you only occasionally see in Reading without being associated with some American chain or other. For a town still grieving the loss of the Grumpy Goat, this felt like a reason to be cheerful.

Restaurant review: Kolae, Borough

On June 21, 2024June 21, 2024 By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

How many of the U.K.’s 100 best restaurants have you been to? I ask because it’s a thing – the National Restaurant Awards – and it came out last week.

Looking through the list, I couldn’t help but feel I was letting the side down as a restaurant reviewer: my score was a measly 7. Some of them, like Manteca, ranked among the best meals I’ve eaten in the course of writing this blog. But there were at least a couple in that list where I thought “really?” I was pleased to see Wilsons make the list but COR, which didn’t feature, is definitely better than at least a couple of the top 100 that I’ve been to. Still, as I’ve said in the past, the delight of reading a list like this largely lies in disagreeing with it.

Anyway, as it happens my total only ticked up to 7 because I happened to visit Kolae, a regional Thai restaurant in Borough, the week before the awards were announced. It was ranked 27th, significantly higher than any of the other places I’ve been to, which is an impressive achievement given that it opened late last year. It’s the second restaurant from the team behind Shoreditch’s Som Saa and has very quickly surpassed it in terms of profile (it probably helps that, unlike Som Saa, it doesn’t have any problematic racist incidents in its history).

What this means is that a significant number of restaurant critics have reviewed the place already: Giles Coren for the Times, Tom Parker Bowles for the Mail On Sunday, Tim Hayward for the FT, Jimi Famurewa for the Evening Standard, and Lilly Subbotin for the Independent. Even a couple of restaurant bloggers have already got in on the act, so I can honestly say I’ve rarely, if ever, read as much about a restaurant before stepping through its front door as I had with Kolae.

And the acclaim was consistent, full-throated, verging on the hyperbolic. I mean, get a load of this: Famurewa said it was a “scintillating shot in the arm”, Parker Bowles that it made “the tastebuds tumescent and the gut giddy”. Hayward, the thinking person’s least favourite broadsheet reviewer, settled for the overblown “This has just reminded me why I eat”.

It wasn’t all like that – Giles Coren spent a large part of his review name-dropping Important People He Knew, as did one distinctly regional restaurant blogger – but the important thing was that there wasn’t a single word of dissent: Kolae, according to the consensus, was magnificent.

So it had been on my radar for a while, and an afternoon off in London ahead of a gig that evening – the exceptional Jessica Pratt at Islington’s Union Chapel – gave me a chance to check it out with Zoë. It’s literally just round the corner from Borough Market, a few doors down from Monmouth Coffee, and a pre-lunchtime stroll round the market made it clear just how much competition there was for Kolae to stand out amongst: not just from traders, but nearby restaurants like Barrafina, Berenjak and Bao.

It’s a handsome site, across three storeys, which apparently used to be a coach house in a previous life. I didn’t see the first or second floors, but the ground floor was lovely, all muted concrete and exposed brick. Everything was nicely proportioned: the tables were generously sized and well spaced, and even the bar stools followed suit, being even better padded than I am. So different from, for example, sitting cheek by jowl at Manteca. The Independent summed it up thus: “there’s no other way to say it, Kolae is cool”.

We arrived for a late lunch but even then the room was full of happy-looking diners. No outside space that I saw, really, but the exterior was quite fetching, to the extent where when we left a couple of people were taking pictures sitting in front of the restaurant and uploading them to the ‘gram. “But they haven’t even eaten here!” was Zoë’s baffled assessment.

The menu, on paper at least, looks like it can’t decide whether it’s a starters and mains or small plates restaurant. All the reviews I’ve read say it’s the latter, but the menu lists three things as “smaller” and the rest as “larger” and our server said we should probably plan on three of the larger plates between two. But it’s sort of structured as starters, mains and sides and so we approached it that way. I would say everything seemed reasonably priced, too, with the smaller plates costing about six pounds and the larger ones going from ten to eighteen.

But really, a lot was fluid: at least some of the larger plates felt more like starters or sides, and at least one of the sides, which we ended up ordering, was far more like a main in its own right. Perhaps all the dishes simply identified as food – if so, all power to them. We took it as an excuse to order pretty much everything we wanted and to risk being full. From what I’ve seen, many people who have reviewed Kolae have taken exactly that approach.

Now, before I tell you about everything we ate, I do have to mention heat. Because another thing my research indicated, time and again, was that the food at Kolae might be hotter than you’re used to. A few reviews don’t really talk about it – presumably because those people are hard as nails. But most go to town on it – in no particular order, the food apparently “jolts the senses like being woken at 4am by a sadistic drill instructor”, “blew my bloody head off”, is “blisteringly hot” or leaves you “teetering between burning pain and pure, unfiltered pleasure”.

Does that sound like fun to you? I have to say it didn’t really to me, so I did ask the server which dishes to absolutely steer clear of. There were about three of them. Everything we had was fine, so you won’t get any sub-Fifty Shades Of Grey hogwash in this review.

The first thing we ate was that first step outside the comfort zone. Fried prawn heads with turmeric and garlic were one of those things where you just have to suspend disbelief and give them a go, so we did. Zoë was reluctant approaching the first one but they were crunchy and distinctly moreish and that meant I didn’t have to polish off the rest on my own. I’m not sure how something from the sea could taste quite so earthy, but these did: I can honestly say that I’ve never enjoyed eating brains so much before, and almost certainly never will again. And yes, prawns do have brains. I know, because I Googled it.

Even better were biryani rice crackers, huge slabs of tactile delight with more than a trickle of nam jim, one of those dipping sauces which just has, and effortlessly combines, everything: sweetness, citrus and funky, salty fish sauce, infinitely more than the sum of its parts. This, for me, was the first of many moments at Kolae where I just thought: this isn’t quite like anything I’ve eaten before. Some of that is my own fault for my sheltered gastronomic life, but if anything that made me appreciate how high definition this food was.

The next few dishes, a mixture of small plates, large plates and specials, were variations on a theme and all linked with the name of the restaurant. Kolae is apparently a southern Thai technique which, as far as I can gather, involves marinating in coconut milk and spice, grilling over fire, re-marinating and re-grilling until what you get is glorious, deep and sticky.

The small plate displaying this technique was a couple of skewers with plump – or, if you get your kicks this way, “tumescent” – mussels threaded on them. I liked them, but perhaps having read so much hype about them I expected these eight mussels to be even more magnificent than they were. Worth it, perhaps, just for the novelty of seeing mussels served in such a different, faff-free way.

It was much, much more successfully deployed with chicken – in this case a huge, deboned chicken thigh which came on a skewer which surely could barely have carried its weight. This is where the technique was really at its best, the meat permeated with complexity and delight.

This kind of food makes fools of us reviewers because it exposes our narrow horizons and our limited vocabulary – I’ve seen it compared to yakitori, to laksa, to satay and to massaman. Better to be honest and say you can’t really sum up the smoke, sweetness, spice and comfort and just say that you should maybe order it so one day, you can compare other great dishes to it instead.

The third of our trilogy of skewers was bavette, topped with crispy onions. You get the idea by now, and although I enjoyed it, three different permutations of that concept was probably one too many. It was better value than the mussels, but not quite as good as the chicken.

At this point, the only question in my mind was where in the pantheon of greats Kolae would wind up nestling. The space was fantastic, the food had been eye-opening – just enough challenge, just enough fascination – and it was simply a wonderful place to be on a weekday afternoon. Every now and again flames leapt from a wok in the open kitchen, there was still hubbub even after the lunch rush had passed, and more was to come.

But that’s where things wobbled, if only slightly. Service had been wonderful, and when you got the attention of a server they couldn’t have been more helpful, but it proved increasingly difficult to flag them down. We’d finished a really gorgeous hazy IPA, Juicy Chug, by small London brewery Jiddler’s Tipple, which had gone beautifully with the small plates, but were keen to get some wine.

And we got there eventually, but if the staff had been more on it I daresay we would have drunk more. It’s a decent and interesting wine list, although the vast majority of the options by the glass were north of a tenner. I really loved my choice, a Greek malagousia and assyrtiko blend, but I think Zoë might have shaded it with her New Zealand riesling.

The first of the large plates that came out again demonstrated that this was a fluid menu where things overlapped and echoed other dishes. I’m not saying that the kale fritters were a replica of the biryani rice crackers from earlier in the meal, but they were definitely close siblings, both in terms of the crunch and complexity. This sauce was very different from the nam jim, but I got sweetness and chilli but maybe not the fermentation the menu suggested would be there. It was however another tactile triumph, although I’m not sure it really felt like a side. Perhaps I should have tried the sour mango salad with dried fish, but everything I’d read suggested that eating it would be a fast train to meltdown..

One of the absolute standout dishes of the meal was – surprise surprise – Zoë’s choice. Soy braised pork belly and ribs was outstanding, in a sauce that was far more about the tightrope between sweetness and saltiness, with heat, just this once, taken out of the equation. The sauce was just gorgeous, the meat was that perfect combination of caramelised and yielding, and it was if anything another dish I hadn’t expected – more poise than bombast, in a meal that had mostly been about very forceful flavours.

And this was where the wobble came in again. We’d ordered this and a second main, a prawn and stone bass curry, and we’d asked for a couple of bowls of rice to accompany them. Our server told us that one bowl of rice would easily be enough for both dishes, and that we could always order more if we wanted to. And maybe that might have been true, but it was very hard to judge when we were waiting something like ten minutes for that second dish to come out.

And this is the drawback of small plates and large plates, starters and mains: because, rightly or wrongly, we had ordered a main each and what this meant in practice was that I sat there like a lemon wondering if they’d forgotten my order. By the time it came out, most of the rice was gone. We ordered another one to go with the fish curry, but didn’t end up using most of it.

I waited so long for my main that I didn’t even get a photo of it, which would frustrate me more if it had been more exciting. It was okay but not extraordinary, and I wonder if the staff have had to manage expectations about the heat levels in the menu following some of those hype-laden reviews, because they told me that this dish was on the hot side and reality it was more restrained than I’d expected.

It was possibly the only thing I ate, up to that point, that tasted unspecial: was that because I’d had to wait so long for it, or just because it didn’t quite match the standard elsewhere? Who knows. All the other reviewers seem to have thought it was out of this world.

Kolae’s menu only had two desserts on it, so naturally we ordered both: how could you resist the possibility that you might just eat the twenty-seventh best dessert in the country? Especially as there was a Coteaux du Layon on the menu, a dessert wine I can never see without ordering which always punches above the likes of a Sauternes (or even a Tokaji, for my money).

Zoë had the worst of it, with a dessert which left her baffled and ambivalent. Mango custard with sweet sticky rice and fresh coconut sounds great, doesn’t it? But the reality was a little odd and neither one thing nor the other. The custard was pleasant enough, if not exactly singing with mango, but the layer of lukewarm rice – more claggy than sticky – left her a little cold. Looking at the reviews I’ve seen, Kolae only did one dessert for some time, and all their desserts have been kind-of permutations of what Zoë had (well, left some of) and what I ordered.

That suggests they might still be searching for the right dishes to end meals at the restaurant. On this evidence, perhaps they should keep looking.

I had the smaller, cheaper and better dessert, and arguably the more conventional one. A single sphere of coconut sorbet, gorgeously smooth, came crowned with a salted tea caramel, peanuts on the side. And again, it felt like a few good ideas in search of better execution: I liked the sorbet, I absolutely loved the caramel, I wanted the ratio of the two to be different. And just dumping peanuts next to it felt like an afterthought, when I’d have liked the whole thing to feel integrated.

As I said, previous reviews I’ve seen suggested that Kolae previously only offered one dessert which combined elements of these two. That process of evolution doesn’t feel like it’s concluded yet.

Still, we were full and happy with much to digest. At this point getting attention was a breeze, and our meal – a lot of food, three drinks apiece and a 12.5% service charge lobbed on – came to a hundred and sixty four pounds. I’ve seen a few reviews say that you could spend less, which you could, but I for one didn’t want to come away from the meal thinking anything along the lines of ‘I wonder what those chicken skewers would have tasted like?’

Hours later, after a hectic traipse round Selfridges and Liberty unsuccessfully trying to identify birthday presents, we sat in the very nice beer garden of a pub in Islington, drank two deeply expensive pints of Steady Rolling Man and talked about our meal. It’s always one of my favourite things about going on duty with Zoë, the post mortem, and few things accompany one as well as sunshine and an al fresco pint of Steady Rolling Man.

Our conclusions were fairly similar – that Kolae was extraordinary, and that we were glad we’d taken a punt on it. That the room was incredible, the location was brilliant and that there were many dishes on there the likes of which neither of us had ever had. If the overwhelming critical reaction did have a feel of mass hysteria about it, it didn’t detract from the fact that it was an excellent restaurant.

And yet, there were a few things that just stopped it from being truly great. The slightly disconnected service, for one, and the homogeneity of some of the menu. And the timing issues with the mains did really bug me: I get that when you bill things as large plates and say people might want to share them you may not guarantee they will all come out seconds apart, but a ten minute lag felt like a gaffe and really did take the sheen off what had otherwise been an excellent meal.

And then there were the desserts, the most underwhelming element of the whole thing. I don’t hold with all the tourists wafting round Borough Market with their naff standard issue strawberries swamped in chocolate, but I seem to remember a stall in the market offering raw milk ice cream. If I’d known what Kolae’s desserts would be like, I’d have gone there instead.

But these are, in the scheme of things, relatively minor quibbles. If you have a list of London restaurants you plan to get round to, and Kolae isn’t on it, I’d definitely recommend adding it. If you have any curiosity about this kind of food and this region, even if like me you might lack the experience or the vocabulary to express it, it’s well worth expanding your consciousness with a visit.

And if you’re slightly worried either by suggestions of apocalyptic chilli heat or the visceral horrors of munching on a plate of prawn heads, don’t worry: the former probably won’t materialise, and the latter isn’t mandatory. That’s just the hype talking – the hype that sells papers, results in reservations and gets a very good restaurant an elevated status as the twenty-seventh best restaurant in the country, less than a year after it opened.

Is it the twenty-seventh best restaurant in the country? I’m not sure about that. I’ve wondered, since eating there, whether it would make my top thirty meals of all time: it’s one of the highest ratings I’ve given out on this blog, but top thirty full stop? Maybe not. But the best is the enemy of the good – and whether or not Kolae is the best, the fact remains that it really is very good indeed. Just leave as many preconceptions as you can at home, and enjoy the ride.

Kolae – 8.7
6 Park Street, London, SE1 9AB

https://kolae.com

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