La Chingada, Surrey Quays

In some ways I wish my last post wasn't about a brand new taco place serving brilliant Mexican food, bringing to UK shores the kind of authenticity and value that we've hitherto rarely seen, because what you're about to read revisits pretty similar ground. But the thing is, there's no good reason that an excellent restaurant shouldn't be written about just because this particular blogger has happened to stumble across the same cuisine in a different city a couple of weeks previously, and anyway, if a new taco joint as good as La Chingada opened every week from now until 2025 it would still be worth writing about because food like this - rewarding, generous, faithfully executed - deserves to be discovered by as very many people as possible.

La Chingada has, of course, already very much been discovered. The intrepid food adventurers at London Eater.com recently featured it on a number of different pages - Where to Eat in London Ths Weekend amongst them - and on a subsequent Sunday afternoon it's probably fair to say staff were struggling to come to terms with their newfound fame. Battling a temporarily broken down grill and a card machine with an extreme reluctance to perform its required duties, the wait to order was, not too far into the afternoon, about 15-20 minutes, and the wait after that to pick up the food probably about the same again. But the crowd waited patiently and in good humour, and before long tantalising plates of fresh tacos were being passed overhead to those lucky enough to have found themselves a seat.

First up, guacamole. In contrast to the stripped-back Madre version (I'm going to end up comparing most of this to Madre I'm afraid, but that's a pretty good benchmark to be judged against), La Chingada's guac has chunks of onions and tomatoes in, and is "wetter", probably through use of more lime juice. Both styles have much to recommend them, and in fact given the choice on taste alone I'm not sure I can choose a favourite - both places serve it with the correct type of lightly salted corn tortillas - but it has to be said that Madre serve a whole lot more guac for £4 than La Chingada do for £4.50, and I'm not sure all of this can be excused by steeper London rents.

Continuing with the sides, chicharrones (pork crackling) were basically unimprovable - fluffy, crisp, light, and perfectly seasoned. They came with a deceptively innocent looking salsa verde, which you start by scooping up in enthusiastic amounts before realising a few mouthfuls in that your face is on fire. The vast number of different ways that taco joints make their salsas is one of the great and everlasting joys of this kind of cuisine - no two places make the same, sometimes the hottest is red, sometimes it's green, sometimes they use smoked arbol chillies, sometimes habanero, and the first thing you should do in any decent taco place is try them all, one by one, to figure out your favourite. At La Chingada I'm in love with their dark red habanero, a masterpiece of salsa work.

So to the tacos. First up, al pastor, a dish borne of Lebanese influences that swaps lamb for pork and turns the vertical spit-roasting method into a very impressive taco filling dispenser. The flavour of the pork was fantastic, the toppings super fresh, the casings soft and earthy, and the whole thing was about as good as you could expect anywhere in London except - again - that pesky spot in Liverpool had found an ever-so-slightly more attractive texture for their al pastor, being soft and blessed with irresistable ribbons of fat where the La Chingada were drier and crunchier, albeit not unpleasantly so. And I'm still only finding fault because I can - they were demolished with glee, like everything else served that afternoon.

More impressive were the suadero, confit beef with an incredible flavour and texture, which should be right at the very top of your must-order list at La Chingada. It's hard to explain why an ostensibly simple arrangement of slow-cooked beef, salad and maize tortilla should be so heartwarmingly wonderful but that's the thing about good tacos - the combination of tender meat, vibrant salad and the all-important lick of chilli goes like a missile for all the taste pleasure points without it being clear exactly why, or how. Best just sit back and enjoy it, is my advice.

And it's really not hard to enjoy La Chingada. Last on the taco list were these carnitas, pork, this time not roasted on a spit but slow-cooked (usually) shoulder which could boast a more interesting texture, if not quite the levels of flavour of the al pastor. Even so, this was a supremely enjoyable taco, and clear porky juices spilled everywhere as we demolished them without dignity or shame.

La Chingada had one final trick up its sleeve - red enchiladas, a special - served with tomatoey potatoes and a pork chop. That's right, La Chingada serve their enchiladas with a massive grilled chop, which is about the best accompaniment I can think of for enchiladas. In all honesty, chop aside this was a rather uneven dish - the potatoes were particularly odd, all wobbly and soft - but hey, where else can you get a massive pork chop and enchiladas on the same plate? Nowhere, that's where. Including, I imagine, in Mexico...

I'm afraid in the general chaos and taco-chucking I forgot to take a photo of the bill, but I've posted my iPhone shot of the menu above so you can pretty much work it out. Essentially, it's good value, reason enough to make a visit even if it wasn't the only decent taco joint for miles around, which it most certainly is. It's clear that people who really know tacos, and really know how to make them, are occupying this bijou spot, and the love they pour into the product is evident in every bite, as well as in the fact that the guy behind the counter was making sure that for every takeaway order taken the recipients didn't live too far away from the shop, lest the tacos got cold and spoiled the experience. That right there is some serious quality control.

So congratulations Surrey Quays, you've beaten most of the rest of the country in the Great Taco Races, and you should be inordinately pleased that La Chingada is on your doorstep. To everyone else, well it's hardly a massive trek for Londoners and I can't imagine anyone would be disappointed with the menu here even after the journey and Eater-inflicted queue inflation combined. If anything, given the quality of the product I can only see the queues getting bigger, so why not jump on the overground now and see what all the fuss is about before it gets seriously oversubscribed. Hand on heart, for sheer ingredient bravery and those cracking margaritas, my top taco peddler is still Madre. But for those times I'm not up north and I have a craving for al pastor, I'll be heading to Surrey Quays.

8/10

Café East, Surrey Quays

There are unlikely locations, and there are unlikely locations. And then, in the corner of a car park next to an ugly great cinema and shopping mall in a desolate area of Surrey Quays, there is Café East. To say it's in the middle of nowhere is being kind - I imagine it's a special journey for people living in Surrey Quays - and were you to pass it by on the way to Hollywood Bowl or park your car up next to it for a trip to the Odeon I doubt you'd give it a second glance. Its competition is a Burger King, a Frankie and Benny's and something called a West Coast Bar & Grill, which I hadn't heard of previously but whose menu reads like one of my worst nightmares, and although I was here on a number of pretty solid recommendations, well, you can't blame me for being suspicious.




But here we were anyway, surveying the large - in physical size if not number of dishes - menu with its handy photos and well-written descriptions. I don't know why I should find photos of the food a pleasant help on Asian menus but a sign of weakness on Western ones, but for some reason I do. Perhaps it's just that Asian food photographs better? Either way, the pictures were good enough to prompt us to order two starters and two mains, and a weird sweet dessert drink called Sam Bo Luong, which had coconut milk and beans and jellied sweets and all sorts in. It tasted a bit like something an overenthusiastic toddler might make for his or her parents as a birthday "treat" out of whatever they could find in the fridge, but was pleasant enough.



Vietnamese spring rolls (Cha Gio) were crunchy and soft in all the right places, and came with a delightfully diverse array of accompanying veg, including sweet basil, bean sprouts, mint, chopped red chillis, coriander and iceberg lettuce. I wasn't sure quite how to combine the salad and the veg to the desired effect, but wrapping one up in iceberg with a bit of coriander and dipping it in the vinegary chilli dip seemed to work pretty well.


Banh Cuon was even more fun. Cheung-fun style steamed rice pastries contained mushroom and minced pork, and were arranged into a neat pile topped with crispy, caramel-y fried shallots and salty slices of luncheon meat. In my tragic foodie way I was perhaps more impressed that I'd never seen this on any other menu before than the actual taste of the dish itself, but it was nonetheless very good, with addictive texture contrasts and a fantastic meaty filling inside the silky pastry. A bargain, too, this amount of food for less than £5.



Mains were even more impressive, in size and flavour. An enormous deep bowl of Bun Bo Xao contained gorgeously rich, sweet stir-fried beef, vermicelli, bean sprouts, sweet pickled carrots and God knows what else along with a spicy fish sauce. After I had thoughtfully picked at each of the component parts for a few minutes my companion lost patience and mixed it all up together with her chopsticks, as I'm sure is the intended style. It was still good, with that mix of textures that the Vietnamese get so right, and particularly bouncy noodles.


And what kind of blogger would I be if I didn't try the house Pho, which with its deeply beefy broth and mix of cooked and raw beef slices ticked every box in my admittedly-not-too-exhaustively-researched What Makes A Good Pho checklist. Like the Bun Bo Xao it was generous in size as well as flavour and surely the best way to spend £7 in a restaurant this side of Shadwell. Actually perhaps that's not much of a compliment. This side of Kingsland Road, then.

Stuffed to the gills, faces flushed with chilli and happiness, we paid our paltry £15 a head bill and waddled off home across the windswept car park towards Surrey Quays Overground. On the way out though, we had a quick peer into the impressively large kitchens, where vast gleaming stockpots bubbled away and a surprising number of chefs worked at the various things chefs do in kitchens. It made sense that food of that standard should come out of such a professional operation, but it is extraordinary just how many staff can make their living in a restaurant charging such tiny prices for such huge portions of excellent fresh food. But I'll leave fretting about operating profits to someone else. Café East was doing a roaring trade last night, and of course it's no miracle that it's popular, despite the herculean effort to get there. They serve brilliant Vietnamese food, smartly, pleasantly, and for not very much money. That, and there's no competition for miles around. Clearly somebody there knows what they're doing.

8/10