For better or worse, every moment spent eating out in London is an education, and on a warm Tuesday evening last week I went to Knightsbridge to learn about Nanyang cuisine. It has a somewhat fluid definition, as these things often do, but generally refers to food from SE China and surrounding areas that have been under varying degrees of Chinese influence for the last few hundred years. So it's Chinese food with Malaysian, Burmese and Vietnamese on the side, with a bit of Indonesian and Filipino thrown in for good measure. And based on dinner at Nanyang Blossom, very nice it is too.
An amuse of marinated cherry tomatoes was a decent enough palate cleanser, although I'm afraid the tomatoes didn't compare very well with ones I'd been lucky enough to have access to in Spain over the last couple of weeks. This is not really anyone's fault - the Spanish tomatoes are amongst the best in the world, and don't travel very well - but these looked the part at least, and they'd gone to the effort of peeling them so they were fun to eat.
A second brief moan before I get onto the good stuff - a cocktail "Nyonya" was not great. Ostensibly containing both rum and tequila alongside cucumber and chilli, a combination of flavours I can very much get behind, it just tasted of nothing but sugared water and was pretty unpleasant. My photo of it didn't come out, though, so this is "Nanyang Blossom", which I didn't try but was apparently quite good. Despite the rather, er, challenging colour scheme.
Fortunately, from here on things took a dramatic turn for the better. This is a cute little basket of chicken rolls, sort of like spring rolls but I think made just from meat - at least, I didn't detect any pastry. They came with a very interesting - and pleasingly chillified - mustard dipping sauce which added personality and fire to the textures from the chicken rolls.
Prawn toast had a clever way of dealing with the rather grey and unappetising colour the prawn element is when you don't use artificial pink colouring (which the cheap stuff always does) - mix it with bright green seaweed. So with a covering of toasted almonds it looked a bit like some kind of pistachio cake, but on tasting was definitely luxurious and beguiling posh prawn toast, bursting with flavour and a range of addictive textures. This one went down very well.
Chicken satays - made with thighs, which as everyone knows is absolutely the best part of a chicken to grill - had a great texture and the satay sauce was beautifully balanced between sweet and savoury. We also hugely enjoyed some little pickled bits on the side - pineapple and cucumber I think amongst other things - alongside the usual peanut sauce.
Seafood fried rice had huge chunks of tender lobster, octopus and prawn touched with wood smoke from the grill, worth ordering by themselves, but the rice beneath was just extraordinary - fragrant and buttery and soft and everything that the best rice should be. They're pretty generous with the portions at Nanyang (as you might expect for Knightsbridge prices) but there was very little left of this by the end of the evening, it was just so easy to eat. A real standout.
Lemongrass chicken was, like all the other grilled items, supremely well done with nice dark crispy details and topped with a tamarind and mango kerisik - a dry toasted coconut condiment with Malaysian origins. Perhaps compared to the wonderful seafood rice this didn't have quite the punch of flavour but it was still very good.
A new dish on that day (we were told), these prawns came both as oatmeal-crust fritters topped in a (slightly sweet for me) curry sauce, and wok-fried in a cute little prawn cracker basket. It's pleasing to note that Nanyang Blossom are willing to keep swapping dishes in and out as the ingredients and seasonal availability change, suggesting that there will be plenty to engage with on repeat visits.
And finally from the savoury courses, lovely bright baby pak choi in a silky garlic-spiked dressing, a fine ingredient at its absolute best.
I liked some elements of the dessert, and not others. A completely unsweetened (as far as I could tell) rice cake topped with something fiercely gelatenous and bright green felt like something that should have been served with a main rather than as a dessert, and a little matcha (?) ball was equally savoury in style. But the crème brûlée underneath was excellent, with a good smoky crisp sugar topping, and I will be the first to admit that textures and flavour profiles of SE Asian restaurant desserts are not often my style. So there's every chance I'm just being picky.
As I said, eating out in London is an education, and Nanyang Blossom is as good as an introduction to this type of food as you could probably want in the city. Alongside Chinatown's YiQi it is a unashamedly mid- to high- end budget operation serving a pan-Asian menu of imaginative, interesting dishes that you will struggle to find anywhere else, or at least done this proficiently anywhere else. Not everything was absolutely perfect - the cocktails needed a bit of work, for a start - but there was enough surprising and delightful in the savoury courses to make the journey - and outlay (about £120/head including wines if we had been paying) - worth the effort. In this part of town, and with enough curiosity about this kind of food, they should do very well.
7/10
I was invited to Nanyang Blossom and didn't see a bill, but as above expect to pay about £120pp with drinks.
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