The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Pan-Asian The food’s explosive and seems like the real deal. So where is everybody?
ICHANGE the order so the Chinese sausage is swapped out of the Vietnamese banh mi and into the hot Taiwanese bento box. Meaning the banh mi – the classic sandwich – is now going to be filled with braised beef flank. This is because I originally ordered Taiwanese roast chicken leg, salt and pepper spice, old railway style, in my hot bento box. It sounded interesting. The most interesting thing on the menu, actually. But five minutes after I sit down a waitress is over saying they don’t have any tonight.
Sigh, it’s a dark Tuesday evening out there with rain pelting down and there’s nobody in here but a couple who are just finishing their meal. Oh, and a female Deliveroo rider who is chilling out down by the front counter waiting like a coiled spring for orders.
Kitchens always seem to operate at reduced ability on nights like these, even in a restaurant such as this which has just opened. It’s so quiet anyway that someone, an owner or manager, will take a table below me and interview, I think, a new chef. I can hear them murmuring away.
It’s so quiet, too, that inevitably – as there are lots of staff hanging around for a rush that will never come – eyes will get taken off the ball. So 20 minutes into my meal I will have to get up and leave this strange little seating area that seems cut off from the rest of the restaurant and go and find someone to ask if I could have that drink I ordered. When I came in.
I am now the only customer in the whole place and I wonder if this is too awkward a space to serve as a restaurant ... and if it always has been. It was certainly a grim and lame-duck venture in a previous life, lingering long after the writing was on the wall.
It’s been refreshed but despite the bright white signs, the splashes of lurid red paint, even its pan-Asian intent, nobody can hide the heavy Victorian-style cornicing, the clumsy partitioning, the dangerous way the main dining area isn’t fully visible to the staff. Nor those strange brass pipe things in the ceiling.
It’s certainly not a place to hang about on a cold Tuesday night. I could be sitting at home in front of the fire right now, I think as I look down at this bento box with suspiciously pink and waxy-looking slices of sausage, white rice and a couple of pre-prepared sides of Vietnamese salad and kkakdugi kimchi. It doesn’t look even slightly promising.
Yet despite appearances the sausage is pleasant, sweetly spiced, and the rice clean, while the kimchi and Vietnamese salad suddenly explode with flavours. I mean to take just a taste of the salad – a mouthful of that chunky kimchi made from mooli, a mild-flavoured white winter radish. But the juicy, garlicky flavours, tinged with fish dressing, the chilli punch and the sudden tartness kick my appetite so firmly back into life that I finish it all and turn like a new man to the three skewers of Chinese lamb shish kebab – billed on the menu as the No1 street food in China. The meat is tender, the cumin in which it has been marinated delicious. Crikey, these are very good, too.
The banh mi now. The baguette is toasted, warm and fresh inside, stuffed with slices of melting braised beef, slathered with Sriracha hot sauce mayonnaise and what space is left is packed with more Vietnamese salad. Boom.
Again this is a flavour explosion. It’s very hard to put down and only marred
by the occasional piece of beef which is too blubbery to be put in any sandwich. Or maybe too blubbery to be put in any sandwich that Scottish people are expected to eat.
Fully revived, for a moment I seriously considering ordering something else. Maybe that salt and chilli aubergine they mentioned at the counter? Nah. The waitress is already clearing away. Maybe next time. Because there will be one.
The banh mi is only marred by the occasional piece of beef which is too blubbery to be put in any sandwich