Mantanah, South Norwood

You may be hearing a lot about Thai food in the coming months. Harrods, in whose food halls I've spent many a happy afternoon (though obviously never buying anything) are running a Thai promotion from 4th May until 6th June, and there is going to be a large Thai Festival in Trafalgar Square on the 5th June. To officially kick off the celebrations, I was very kindly invited to the launch reception in the Lancaster Hotel on Wednesday, nibbling on lovely fresh Thai canapés and answering questions about food blogging from friendly but clearly baffled Thais:

"Are you press?"
"Kind of - I have a food blog."
"What company do you work for?"
"I don't, it's just me, I don't earn anything from it"
"Oh."
[pause]
"Would you like a duck roll?"

Most of the big names in Thai food in London were there (apart from Nahm, although based on everything I've heard this was perhaps a blessing), and it was nice to chat to the people from Patara and the Mango Tree and the Blue Elephant and try their food. It all got me thinking though - where are the decent, mid-range Thai restaurants in London? I have visited the Pataras in Mayfair and Soho and they're both very good, but these are high-end restaurants and the average spend per head can creep over £50 once you add in wine. At the bottom end of the scale you can pick up a Pad Thai for a few quid from the Whitecross Street market, but this is hardly anything to rave about. The food I had in Thailand, with its bold fresh flavours, unusual ingredients and a near-catastrophic level of chilli heat, was like nothing I've seen over here, and while I can appreciate that London restaurants may have to tone down the chilli slightly, I still haven't been anywhere for around £20 a head attempting anything much more than fishcakes and rice. Still, at least fishcakes and rice are recognisably Thai. One stall on Wednesday, from a restaurant I won't name, offered me a canapé consisting of tamarind and foie gras.

"We are calling it French-Thai fusion food!" the owner beamed. "We don't eat foie gras in Thailand!" he added happily, "People think it's disgusting!". I cried inside.




So the search for decent, affordable Thai food is on. Mantanah in South Norwood has been on my list for years, but it has taken until Wednesday's prompting to actually get me off my bum and onto the rickety half-hourly train service from Clapham Junction. If I was being kind I'd describe the location as 'unassuming' and the décor in the restaurant as 'faded', but some of the best food is produced in the unlikeliest locations, as anyone who's ever been to Whitechapel will tell you. We started with some sticks of battered and deep-fried sweet potato, and something called "Pearl of Mantanah".



Way too many greasy battered potato pieces were matched with a gloopy sweet chilli sauce which if it wasn't bought in was doing a pretty good impression of something that was. Worse though were the "Pearls", which were huge wobbly balls of sago containing a miniscule amount of peanut and chicken filling. The sago stuck to the insides of your mouth and glued your teeth together like putty - it really was pretty unpleasant, like something from a bush tucker trial. They either needed to use far more filling and far less sago or just abandon the idea altogether. Weird.



Mains were scarcely better. Pad Thai (our "control" dish) was greasy and way too sweet, a poor example of what is usually a tasty dish - even Thai Square can get this right. A chicken "jungle curry" had quite a nice broth but the pieces of chicken were overcooked and chewy and the flavours hadn't been allowed to mix together for long enough - there was no chilli hit at all until I unexpectedly bit through a whole chunk of the stuff and it blew my head off. Only something called "E-sarn classic" showed any kind of promise, which although also too sweet had a nice flavour and good mix of proper Thai vegetables like pea aubergine.


I was hardly expecting the greatest Thai experience of my life in Mantanah but I just came away with the impression that nobody in the restaurant really cared enough about anything they were doing. Tablecloths were dirty, glasses marked, and a bowl of water lilies by the front door was stagnant and ugly. The food, too, was clumsily seasoned and carelessly presented - the obvious comparison to make with SE Asian cuisine in the same price bracket is Mien Tay, where every last detail of every plate is fresh and beautiful. Mien Tay may be a one off, but it at least demonstrates how good SE Asian cuisine can be while resisting the temptation to use foie gras and charge £50/head.

It's strange that Thai food in Thailand is so right, and yet Thai restaurants in London so often get it all so wrong. Strange, and frustrating. But the search goes on, and I have a few more likely contenders lined up. Come on mid-range Thai restaurateurs of London. Don't let me down again.

4/10

Thailand at Trafalgar Square is on Saturday 5th June. More details here

Viet Grill, Kingsland Road

Mien Tay Battersea is a wonderful restaurant, serving spectacular food at miniscule prices, with staff so smiley and warm you want to take them home with you. It would be a wonderful restaurant anywhere in London, of course, but as I've mentioned before, its location on Lavender Hill is nothing short of a miracle, and has probably single-handedly raised the nearby house prices to a statistically significant degree. But it's too easy to forget that back where it all began for Vietnamese food in London, on the Kingsland Road in the East End, there are a selection of restaurants who regularly give Mien Tay a run for its money, and fuel the virtuous circle of competition and higher standards that we've come to expect from this most exciting and satisfying of cuisines. One of these restaurants is the Viet Grill.



Unusually for reviews on this blog, this isn't my first visit to the Viet Grill. I usually try and write up places after a first visit, which is perhaps not a completely fair method (to say the least) but is at least consistent, and I estimate I've eaten here well over twenty times since I discovered it a couple of years ago. Other than a lick of paint and the occasional change of staff, though, not a great deal has changed, so I hope this is as reliable a review as any other I've posted. Not very, in other words. But here we go anyway.


If there's one thing that the Vietnamese can do better than anyone else, it's a salad. It's mainly a texture thing - the combination a multitude of ingredients that go pop, crunch, squish and splosh, all on one plate, is addictive and unique, as far as I can tell, to these kinds of restaurants. This mango salad contained fragrant Thai basil, tasty shoots of (I think) lotus stem, a couple of hits of bright red chilli and - best of all - crunchy tubes of salty dried squid tentacles, and it all worked together perfectly. All the fresh, fragrant ingredients not only made an incredibly tasty dish but even made you feel like you were doing yourself good when eating it. And you can't often say that.


Crispy spring rolls were perhaps quite a tame choice (we had eaten the delicious summer rolls on many previous visits and fancied a change) but were deftly fried and had a greaseless crunch. They came with a thin, vinegary chilli dip which was a cut above your average gloopy sweet sauce, as you'd expect.


This beautiful, tender, charcoal-seared 'Feudal roasted beef' was at £9 one of the more expensive starters, but boy do you get your money's worth. First of all, the sheer quantity of it, which would by most restaurants standards be a good main course portion, and also, the beef itself was superb, powerfully marinated and served with an umami-rich soy dressing.


I didn't know what to make of the Saigon pork belly dish when it first arrived - it looked challenging to say the least, the huge cubes of fat wobbling provocatively in the caramelised coconut sauce. But on tasting, all was forgiven. I admit to separating the majority of the fat from the meat and leaving it uneaten - there was too much of it even for me - but the coconut sauce was rich and moreish and the stewed pork pieces had fantastic strong flavour.


Along with a couple of bowls of steamed rice (which I used to soak up the rest of the pork coconut sauce) and a couple of glasses of wine, the final bill came to £20 each, perhaps slightly more than the same meal might have been at Mien Tay but in nicer surroundings and with certainly a comparable level of cooking. Kingsland Road is a fine example of what can happen when restaurants all compete on the same style of cuisine, and instead of trying to survive by slashing ingredient costs and employing pushier fronts of house (a la Brick Lane) instead try to outdo each other by serving better food. It's the way it should work and yet so rarely does. And the results speak for themselves.

9/10