Part of the vast, shiny new 180 Strand development, AngloThai at Outcrop is an entirely outside - albeit thankfully mainly covered - restaurant designed to make the most of the summer months. Unfortunately on Friday the weather was a bit more traditionally Anglo than Thai, bucketting down with rain and temperatures in the teens. Still, there is a certain cozy appeal to the space, attractively decorated with plenty of green and rows of growing herbs, even if I did get completely lost on the way and ended up having to enter rather dramatically through a fire exit (with the permission of the nice staff).
I was never going to dislike AngloThai. I've had a keen interest in John Chantarasak & Diz West's husband and wife operation for many years, and was very pleased when they announced they'd - finally - found a permanent home. But as we all know, the restaurant industry is completely broken, their deal fell through, and they found themselves hosting yet another popup in this new Soho House building, albeit a popup that will last a few months instead of the usual couple of days.
Alongside a couple of welcome cocktails - Tomato Top Negroni was lovely, a kind of half-negroni half-Bloody Mary, Crop Circle Cooler could have done with a bit less of the elderflower cordial in it as it was rather sweet, but still drinkable - we had Carlingford oysters dressed in a chilli and sea buckthorn mixture which was incredibly clever. Chilli and citrus always work well with seafood (at least, I can't think of any instance when they don't) so this was a great start.
A couple of bits of pieces of blogger-bonus extras appeared throughout the evening. This is flatbread with shrimp paste butter and Cornish shellfish, more on the Anglo side of things than the Thai you could argue but none the worse for that, with nice fluffy fresh bread and plenty of nice fresh seafood.
Things kicked into the next gear with the arrival of an utterly wonderful hot & sour turbot bone broth, the liquid containing both a generous amount of mussels and some hen of the woods mushrooms alongside good knows what else. The seafood and vegetables were very good, but really this was all about that broth, a perfect balance of chilli and sour notes and something I could have devoured pint after pint of.
Equally impressive in a totally different way were violet artichoke tempura with yellow soybean and sugarcane vinegar. The "tempura" was quite different from the Japanese style, almost like fried pastry, or string hopper. The flavour of the artichoke inside shone, and the clever gels and sauces dotted on the top presumably were the soybean and vinegar elements. It all combined to be soft, crunchy, sharp, soft, sweet, sour all at once and alongside the broth I would consider this dish a must-order.
Only slightly less successful in my opinion was the venison tartare, which seemed like it needed a lot more of the advertised scallop roe chilli jam and makrut lime to balance the rather bland protein. Or maybe it just wasn't for me; I'm a bit fussy about tartare.
It's unusual for me to order a large sharing dish for a main - it does, after all, mean I have one less dish to talk about - but we definitely didn't regret this giant half chicken with palm sugar glaze, cooked to a nice golden skin and beautifully moist inside, and going excellently with a rather addictive soybean and elderflower dipping sauce. On the side, a nice Thai salad of julienned veg with hazelnuts, and a very meaty bowl of spelt with cured beef heart and long pepper which nearly finished us off.
But the promise of dessert proved too great since we were enjoying ourselves so much, and both were briliant - a tea burnt cream and summer berries creme brulee thingy, and a marvellously smooth and refreshing fig leaf sorbet which came with a mandala-shaped coconut ash cracker in which they'd cleverly managed to get blobs of caramel inside the folds of the biscuit.
The bill came to just over £90pp, basically the new normal for central London dining, and certainly bang on what was reasonable for cooking of this style and imagination. Look, I was never going to dislike AngloThai and I didn't, but there's a certain extra heartwarming pleasure in seeing these guys back where they belong serving Thai food made with British ingredients and a well-chosen wine list (Diz) to a room of happy punters, and served by a front of house team whipped into shape by Clove Club boys Johnny Smith and Daniel Willis no less. I really hope they do find a permanent space sooner rather than later. But in the meantime, AngloThai at the Outcrop is here, and it's great, and if you have any even passing interest in what happens when the finish British ingredients are treated to intelligent Thai techniques, look no further.
8/10
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