AngloThai at Outcrop, the Strand

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

Darjeeling Express at the Sun & 13 Cantons, Soho

Regular readers will notice I don't really cover one-off events, popups and launches on this blog. If they're good, it seems a bit much gloating about an evening that nobody else will have the chance to go to, and if they're bad I'd usually rather just forget the whole thing ever happened. It's always nice to be invited to things, of course, but whether or not you agree with the opinions on these pages I hope the least I can be is useful - don't go here, go here, have the lamb chops. That kind of thing.

That said, all rules are there to be broken, and of course I have very occasionally written about popups if it looked like there was a chance of their legacy lasting. I don't regret lavishing praise on Ben Greeno all those years ago; it wasn't my fault he decided to move to Sydney as soon as word of his talent got out. And I knew a brief stint at a pie & mash shop in Hackney wouldn't be the last we saw of the brilliant Sabel - they're currently doing their thing in a beautiful loft space in Clapton and you haven't lived until you've tried their custard tart. Get tickets while you can.

And someone else who is definitely going places is Asma Khan. First there was her supper club in Kensington, still spoken about in hushed tones by those lucky enough to have been. And now she's to be found in residence at the Sun & 13 Cantons in Soho, Mondays to Wednesdays, serving food so good it threatens to spoil every other Indian meal you've ever eaten. Ever.

Right from the very first bite it's clear that this is food that has been considered, carefully crafted and loved. Newari Salad had a beguiling mix of earthy sesame and red chilli heat, cooled by chunks of cucumber; I could have eaten nothing but buckets of this and come away happy. So often salads in Indian food are just a pile of chopped onion and tomato to go on your poppadums - this was a genuinely unique (as far as I know, for London at least) little dish, enough to make me want to know a lot more about Newari cuisine. To the left of it is a lamb samosa to end all lamb samosas - packed full of spicy meat in a delicate thin pastry and provided with a tangy tamarind dip. All of these were provided free of charge because my friend was running late, and I'm fairly confident Asma didn't know me from Adam at this point - the service (also provided mainly by Asma herself) being every bit as good as the food.

So when my friend finally arrived we ordered more of the punchy lamb samosas, and a round of "puchkas", dainty little things you may have seen elsewhere as pani puri but almost definitely never as good as this, each packed to the brim with so much fresh diced vegetables that there was hardly any room for the tamarind water you have to pour inside.

Tamarind dal (left) was a thick and spicy version of this Indian home-cooked favourite.

"This is how we always had it at home" said Asma as we enthusiastically worked our way through it.

"Does everyone eat this well at home in India?" I wondered, already deliberating the cost of a one-way flight and a nice air-conditioned apartment somewhere with a view of the Bay of Bengal.

"Not everyone, no - we were very lucky."

Turns out Asma is of Indian royal stock - her family own a fortress somewhere in the north of the country, and her own experience of the Newari and Mughlai dishes she creates so confidently today was solely being on the receiving end until a trip back to her ancestral kitchens to learn the recipes she'd been eating all her young life. So the dishes you see here are, technically, home-style, but home-style as served to the very upper echelons of Indian society. At least, until now.

The khosa mangsho, Bengali goat curry, was probably my favourite dish of all, and as you might have gathered by now, that's really saying something. Chunks of melting-tender goat in a sauce so powerful and complex it makes a mockery of anything else purporting to call itself a curry. With fragrant rice to soak it up, it's a dish that could turn the most stubborn and timid souls into an Indian food enthusiast.

Even the desserts were memorable, and not just compared to the sweet fritters and one-note kulfis that are usually offered by your local High St curry house. Nankhatai are biscuits flavoured with rose water and pistachio, warm from the oven, and this little carrot cake topped with pistachios was just lovely, a gentle bouncy texture and expertly balanced flavours.

Clearly if you have even the most passing interest in Indian food you should do everything you can to get a table at the Sun & 13 Cantons (Monday to Wednesday only, remember) while Asma is in residence, as food as good as this, and service as warm and friendly as this, demands an audience. But the fact remains that Darjeeling Express is still a popup, and once the takeover comes to an end, what next? A clue may be in the form of head chef of Gymkhana, Karam Sethi, who just happened to be enthusiastically working his way through the entire menu the very same night I was. This is a man who knows his Indian food (in fact I'd say one of the few people in London whose skills in balancing complex spices could match Asma's) but also - crucially - knows his restaurants. With the phenomenally successful Lyle's, Bao and Kitchen Table already in his portfolio, surely he'd spot the potential of another bundle of raw talent to set up with a nice central location? You heard it here first.

9/10

More information on Asma and Darjeeling Express can be found on her website.

Som Saa, London Fields

For years, I thought I didn't like Thai food. Greasy spring rolls, rubbery chicken satays in a sickly orange sauce, soggy Pad Thai bulked out with a murky mix of frozen vegetables; at best it was boring, at worst that special kind of sweet, mushy blandness that speaks of a long time left in the freezer. And then I went to Thailand on holiday, and realised that I didn't dislike Thai food, I just disliked Thai food in the UK, which at the time (and until fairly recently) was about as close to the real thing as a Harvester is to the Hind's Head.

Why the discrepancy? The same old issues that held back food in this country for so long - lack of ambition, low expectations from the public in general, and the fact that so many considered eating out a wild extravagance held only for the most special occasions, forcing restaurants to eke through empty weekdays occasionally chipping stuff out of the freezer when needed, and hoping to shift enough Blue Nun on Friday night to make the whole enterprise worthwhile. In much of the country, this is still sadly the case - the demand just isn't there, and with very few notable exceptions, small town restaurants are pretty dire. Hell, even Liverpool struggles, and there's over two million people live there.

What any cuisine needs to be at its best, then, is an open-minded customer base, access to good fresh ingredients, and a restaurant that can make the numbers work. The problem that most Asian food, and Thai food specifically has, is that when you've had the best Pad Thai of your life from a back street in Chang Mai and it costs 40p, persuading the same people back in London that their equally tasty version is worth £10 is a bit of an ask. But if anyone can persuade London that good Thai food is worth shelling out a bit extra for, it's Som Saa.

That's not to say Som Saa is expensive; quite the opposite. It's actually incredibly good value compared to the dross trotted out in the name of Thai food in most of the capital (hang your head in shame, Thai Square) - perhaps too good value, and I'll come back to that later. There are some snacks for £3-4, various bits of grilled meats with dipping sauces for £6-7, and a couple of sharing plates that go up to £14. By anyone's standards, this is a keenly priced restaurant. What makes it an extraordinary restaurant is that the dishes produced are innovative and unusual at any price point; this is Thai food like you've never seen before, full of colour and vibrancy, authentic where it counts but making exciting use of premium British ingredients alongside Thai staples. It is, in short, the best Thai restaurant I've ever been to outside Thailand.

This is jan naem, a fermented pork snack that they apparently make by secreting bits of it away in the hottest corners of the railway arch the restaurant currently calls its home. It's sharp and fresh, quite unlike any other pork dish I've ever tasted, the acidity turning the generous slabs of pig into something approaching pickled but actually way more complex and rewarding than that.

Beef in betel leaf is something you may have seen before at one of the (many decent) Vietnamese places on Kingsland Road, and they were every bit as good here, with that familiar soft beef filling and topped with crunchy peanuts. The chilli/vinegar dip was not only familiar in flavour to the kind of thing you get in SE Asia but the pink bowl it came in was a lovely little nod to streetfood tableware as well.

This is one of the "snacks", pla bon dtaeng mor, strips of watermelon with an interesting smoked fish powder and crunchy fried shallots. Like the jan naem, I've never had anything like it before although it did remind me slightly of the very clever chilli watermelon salad at Chick'n'Sours - that same addictive mix of fresh fruit and Scoville heat that simultaneously burns and soothes.

Som tam was arguably one of the more familiar Thai dishes on the menu at Som Saa, but was done with such style that it still managed to feel completely new. Fresh and vibrant, and another great use of that "roadside pastel" tableware. I'm convinced there is no cuisine that does salads better than Thai food - the care and attention given to the play of textures and chilli in the vegetarian dishes is never less than equal that of the protein.

Excuse my attempt at an arty Instagram-style shot - that on the right is gai yang grilled chicken leg with dipping sauce. I find the different styles of butchery in world cuisine fascinating. Usually in Western cuisine a chicken will be neatly jointed into drumstick, thigh and wing, and you work your portion control around that. In Carribbean (jerk) and SE Asian food though, a sharp cleaver cuts the chicken up into equal sizes regardless of the part of the animal - it's quicker and easier to prepare, and produces bits easier for dipping.

The star dish was always likely to be this seabass nam dtok pla thort, because I can't think of a single meal that wouldn't be improved by an entire deep-fried fish to share. Isn't it magnificent? And it tasted just as good as it looked, the rich, herby dressing hitting all of those amazing Thai food pleasure points - sweet, hot, sour, crunch.

There was a pork belly curry, thick and velvety, that I forgot to take a picture of, and a very interesting smoked fish relish with dipping vegetables that I did. But by this point I imagine you'll need no further evidence that Som Saa is a restaurant at the very top of its tree. It's Thai food that successfully demonstrates everything that makes this cuisine so special at some incredibly generous prices.

So where do we go from here? Because as they'll tell you themselves, Som Saa is only in this space temporarily and needs to move to a situation, and setting that will go the distance. Shared tables and a streetfood vibe are fine when you're finding your feet and building an audience, but Andy Oliver's astonishing food deserves more - a room and an atmosphere that reflect the days of backbreaking prep that goes into each dish (days of pickling, crushing, chopping and fermenting, if rumours are to be believed; they work all week but are only open to the public Thursday-Sunday). So bizarrely for a restaurant blogger and happy customer, I think Som Saa v2 should charge more. Not tablecloths and silver service but we need to demonstrate that people are willing to pay that bit extra when the results more than justify it. With a bit of extra spend per head, this stunningly talented bunch of people can really go places. The future is bright.

9/10

We were spotted and had a couple of extra dishes brought out for free, but I think the bill per head would have been about £25-£30 otherwise including a bottle of lovely Picpoul

Sabel popup, Broadway Market

Many years ago I made it an unwritten policy never to write up one-off events, or supperclubs (and therefore also, by extension, one-off supperclubs). One-off special events are very rarely of interest to anyone outside the most geeky set of food obsessives, and though I certainly count myself amongst that group, I'm not sure how many of the people who read this blog do. It also seemed a bit like bragging - "look at this great meal I went to! What's that, you want to go as well? Well you can't! Haha!" - and I'd rather the blog was mainly a useful database of places you might want to go for your dinner, rather than an exhaustive record of everything I personally ate over the course of a year. Which would be pretty bloody terrifying, for one thing.

Supperclubs are a tricky one, too. I've been to lots of very good ones and a few pretty terrible ones, and if I only wrote up the good it would very soon become clear the glaring omissions were the bad. And although there's no good reason why I couldn't explain in exhaustive detail on these pages everything that was wrong with a meal served by a young couple in their own home in good faith, at cost price and with no other desire than for a random group of strangers to enjoy themselves, you can hopefully understand why I'm not. I may be a bastard, but I'm not evil.

There has been the odd exception, though. Ben Greeno's multi-course spectacular at his old flat in Hackney was worth shouting about for a number of reasons - it was one of the best meals I've ever been served in someone's house, for starters - but now also stands in historical interest as one of the jumping-off points for the Young Turks. Along with James Lowe and Isaac McHale, Greeno had a huge impact on the way restaurant food was heading in London, and now is doing the same for Sydney under the supervision of David Chang.

And now I'm going to break my own rule again because Sabel are also worth shouting about. They are one chef (him), one front of house (her) who most of the time are involved with outside catering and events management, but who every other weekend host a popup in the unlikely location of F Cooke pie'n'mash shop on Broadway Market in Hackney. And yes on the one hand they are just another trendy popup in East London serving Modern British food, but there is something more to these guys.

"Oxtail and smoked bone marrow pie, pickled red cabbage". I challenge you to see that on a menu and not want to order it immediately. It's a wee little thing, but thanks to a delicate golden pastry and a gentle smokey filling, easily satisfied. The sweet clovey pickled red cabbage was top-notch too.

Lamb scrumpets (what a brilliant word) were breaded, deep-fried fingers of lamb, accompanied with a tart redcurrant jelly. Commendably greaseless and using powerfully flavoured meat, they would give pork scratchings a run for their money in a top bar snack competition.

A grilled lettuce and anchovy salad was pretty as a picture. It also sparked off a conversation about how rarely you see grilled lettuce on a menu these days, and how nice it is when done properly. The eggs had precisely soft yolks, the lettuce full of flavour and not too mushy, and some croutons added a good crunch. One of those dishes that is deceptively simple and could easily have been a disaster had not each element been handled perfectly.

Cured sea trout was just as impressive. As with the salad, it superficially seems straightforward - just trout, on a plate, covered in dill-mustard dressing. But the trout was packed with flavour and wonderfully moist, the dressing balancing out the cured fish, and the side of pickled cucumbers was faultless. It also came with a slab of E5 bakehouse sourdough, a product that has never been known to lessen the qualities of a dish.

Then, beef cheek and mash. If you're already fan of beef cheek and mash, then you won't need me to go into too much detail - you'll just need me to tell you that it was a very, very good beef cheek and mash. And if you've not yet had the chance to try beef cheek and mash, then you should book yourself in at Sabel and order theirs immediately. Finally, if you're not the kind of person who can enjoy a chunk of rich, salty slow-cooked beef oozing its dark juices into a dollop of silky, cheese-spiked mashed potato then there is no hope for you, and you may as well just go and live on a commune somewhere and eat lentils.

With everything up to this point being so good, we weren't in the mood to stop there. So Eccles cake and Lancashire cheese provided a neat conjoint between the savoury and sweet courses, room-temperature cheese matched with a golden pastry case so full of gooey sultana mixture it practically exploded when I prodded it with a fork.

But the best, incredibly, was yet to come. An egg custard tart, with an impossibly light-yet-firm pastry base and a filling so expertly judged so as to somehow hold its shape on the plate yet melt away to a liquid in the mouth, was worth the 1 1/2 hour journey to Hackney and then some. It came with a rhubarb and ginger compote thing which, to be honest, it didn't need at all but was nonetheless also a very impressive bit of work.

So there we have it, and hopefully you can see why I think it's been worth a few words. Toby and Lianna are doing their thing on Broadway Market for a couple more weekends (dates here), and then - ah well after that, then things are likely to get quite interesting. They are looking for a permanent site, and anyone with the ability to provide one should be tripping over themselves to help out, because cooking and service of this standard deserves better than a draughty pie shop on Broadway Market. This may be the first, but all being well it almost certainly won't be the last you've heard of Sabel.

9/10

I was invited to review Sabel

Flat Iron, Shoreditch

If you were to design a restaurant that ticks every box on the "London Restaurant Trends in 2012" list, where would you start? No reservations obviously, that goes without saying. You should describe yourself as a "pop up" too, even if you have no intention of ever "popping down". A no-choice menu, they're awfully trendy aren't they, printed on recycled paper in that typewriter font that Polpo use, and absolutely no currency symbols. There should be a cocktail bar serving drinks in wildly unsuitable glassware, tables should be uncomfortably close together, and make sure you have as much exposed brick and bare light bulbs as possible. Once all the above is in place, then it hardly matters what the food is like does it? They'll be queuing down the street.

Sigh

Flat Iron is an operation so desperately on-trend in so many ways it's almost a parody. There's the tin cups of popcorn from Spuntino; the huge block of ice behind the bar from MeatEasy; the juleps in metal cups from Hawksmoor. There isn't a single item of décor or presentational quirk that hasn't been "researched" (ie. nicked) from somewhere else; even the waiting staff's outfits looked rather familiar. All of which would be excusable, of course - deeply irritating, but excusable - if the One Thing they have on their menu - the titular Flat Iron steak, a cut from the featherblade - was any good. It isn't.

Before I get to that though, a couple of things that weren't terrible. The chips were quite good - cooked in meaty dripping, nice and crispy, and a pretty generous portion for £2.50 - sorry I mean "2.5". There's a decent beer list, too, consisting of bottles from the London Fields brewery (uber-localism is fashionable, after all) as well as the always-popular Brewdog. And service, from an efficient gaggle of attractive twentysomethings, was spot-on, meaning despite everything I was quite happy to pay the automatically-added service charge.

But oh dear, the steak. First of all, it had a very unpleasant smell, sort of a cross between a cowpat and a high street butchers. I'm not entirely sure why, but perhaps I'd rather remain in the dark on that. It had also, I think, been slow-cooked in some kind of waterbath as the colour was uniform inside, a common shortcut in lesser steakhouses that need to churn out hundreds of dishes an hour with inadequate grilling facilities, but still annoying. But usually, even when rubbish restaurants sous-vide their steak, they at least finish it off over charcoal to provide a bit of texture and a nice smoky flavour. Not so here as far as I can tell - they arrived soft and gelatinous inside and out, admittedly tender but with no crust and no sign it had been anywhere near a flame. And why provide a (grubby) ironic butcher's cleaver as a steak knife if you're going to slice up the meat before serving it anyway?

"But it's only £10" I can hear you say. "What did you expect?" Well, yes it is only a tenner, far less than you'd pay for the cheapest steak on the menu anywhere else, and on the face of it quite a bargain. But it's a false economy. This was a bland, incompetently cooked bit of cheap meat - why pay £10 for a deeply unsatisfying steak when you can either pay more for a good one, or eat something else entirely? Except, at Flat Iron you can't because steak is all they do. Because no-choice menus are trendy.

It wasn't just the steak that irritated, though. The tables all seated about 12 people so if you turn up as a couple (and as you can't reserve, most people do) there's a good chance you'll end up sat between two complete strangers, sharing your conversation as well as your elbow space as the distance to your friend opposite is slightly too big for confidentiality. And each of the cocktails we ordered - a Bramble infused with thyme (for some reason) and the house julep - were very sweet although I'm willing to admit they might have been OK if you like sweet cocktails.

Of course, inevitably, depressingly, Shoreditch is lapping it up. The queue trailed out the door by the time we'd paid up (the best part of £25/head once a cocktail and portion of chips each had been added) and plenty more hipster types were milling about in the bar area waiting for spaces. In this most slavishly trend-conscious part of town it seems few can resist the lure of somewhere that so expertly, if so cynically, gives people just what they want - the illusion of an "underground" discovery, the lengthy queue, the bragging rights of securing an oversubscribed table, the cocktail served in a jam jar. As for what happens when you sit down to eat, well, who cares about that?

3/10