Long Chim in Soho is a new restaurant by the chef David Thompson, the man who changed the face of Thai food in the UK back in the early noughties. You’ll hear this repeated by chefs and food writers whenever Thompson’s name is mentioned, and his work genuinely warrants genuflection. Without him, it is said, there would be no Som Saa, no Kiln, no Smoking Goat, no Speedboat Bar, nor many of those other hip Thai eating spots run by earnest boys called Crispin who serve kipper curry to other earnest boys called Crispin.
Thompson did not by any means invent the concept of Thai people eating – they’ve been managing perfectly well by themselves since the country was created in the 13th century – but he certainly dismantled the UK’s love of gelatinous yet sating pad Thais and of boiled chicken pieces swimming in tinned coconut milk and masquerading as green curry. When he opened Nahm in 2001, Thompson laughed in the face of the predictable, cosy and safe Thai food we’d been used to – comforting sweetness and nuttiness, with gentle, fragrant wafts of coriander and unthreatening heat – and instead favoured scallops, pigeon, Asian celery, white pepper and often alarmingly bold levels of both fresh and dried chillies.
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Twenty years on, in a rather chaotically styled venue in the heart of London’s theatreland, there’s little evidence that he’s mellowing much. Long Chim has taken over the ground floor of Hovarda, a restaurant I once walked out of because they wouldn’t let me have a walk-in table unless I gave them my name, phone number and postcode, and which still operates from the first floor. Anyway, the ground level space has been rejigged with garish decor and a clanking open kitchen, and seems to have been inspired by a design palette that screams: “This could be a Bangkok street food scene, right, guys?” complete with bold neon signs, animal murals and studiously staged piles of bottles. At times, the lighting is purple, at others blue, should you have ever wondered how you’d look as a Smurf. Why do designers persist in trying to recreate “the street” indoors? It always looks like a themed shooting range at Chessington World of Adventures.
The menu, meanwhile, leans on the side of crowdpleasers, with monkfish curry, crispy pork in five spices and “Long Chim rolls”, which turn out to be long, thin, slightly wonky, crisp spring rolls stuffed with a non-obtrusive mulch of mustard greens. Be warned, though, this menu is startlingly brief, featuring a mere four starters – a couple of skewers, those spring rolls, rice cakes with crunchy pork – seven mains and the briefest of nods towards pudding; the rice option is steamed jasmine or no rice at all.
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“Long chim” translates loosely as “come and try”, and you literally could try everything here on a single visit. The menu feels as if it began life as something a bit more ambitious – the pre-opening hype promised wagyu beef salad and red snapper fishcakes, for instance – and seems somewhat meagre when compared with, for instance, those at nearby Kiln and Speedboat. It’s punchily priced, too: a single skewer of admittedly delicious grilled beef with turmeric, galangal and coriander costs £8, while a suggestion of southern-style grilled squid with ginger is £6 a nibble. Two black tiger prawns with celery, spring onions and glass vermicelli (£19) all sang in the same key: white pepper. The pomegranate salad was a thick, rather jammy bowl of rich red fruit that acted as a welcome foil to the mellow monkfish curry with a cucumber relish.
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My advice here would be to order big, if your wallet allows it, or you might well leave still a bit hungry, in which vein we ordered both the desserts on offer. Grilled sticky rice with banana was exactly that: grilled lumps of rice with hot banana. The other pudding, however, turned out to be the star of the entire evening. Tapioca with coconut and corn was a complex and pretty bowl of wobbly frogspawn with sunrise-yellow corn. And before any of you start, there’s no such thing as bad tapioca: it is the saviour of a million 1970s British schoolchildren’s teatimes, and it’s widely loved across Thailand, too.
Long Chim is a place for Thompson’s many fans to head to pay homage to a culinary legend. If they’re lucky, they might even catch the man himself behind the stoves, so they’ll be able to thank him in person for the impact he’s had on the UK’s approach to Thai dining. Long Chim may not be quite his best work, but the fact that he will always be remembered is not up for debate.
Long Chim 36-40 Rupert Street, London W1, 020-3319 7750. Open dinner only Tues-Sat, 5-10.30pm. From about £35 a head, plus drinks and service.
The next episode of Grace’s Comfort Eating podcast is out on Tuesday 24 December – listen to it here