From charity shop to tropical paradise

This ‘Mauritian street kitchen’ is very heaven, says Keith Miller LUNCH FOR TWO

One of our selection protocols for the Pint to Pint column you’ll see over to the right of these words is to google any pub or bar that’s suggested to us by the motley crew of mountebanks, troubadours and distressed gentlefolk who comprise our pub reviewing corps. Ideally, the first page of search results will be free of such off-putting and lifestyle-unfriendly terms as “fracas”, “rampage”, “Health and Safety Executive” and so on. One of my favourite Victorian gin palaces, the Salisbury in north London, had to cool its heels on the subs’ bench for about two years, until the autocomplete window stopped helpfully indicating that the most searched-for predicate to the pub’s moniker was “stabbing”.

It’s never seemed necessary to take the same precautions over the Table for Two column. Yet there’s a shadow over this week’s selection, one of a handful of Mauritian restaurants in the UK: the tropical paradise in question has been in the news for all the wrong reasons since the MV Wakashio ran aground on one of its legendary coral reefs three weeks ago, threatening a disastrous oil spill.

It looks as though that’s been averted, at least for now – and I guess the island was resigned to a becalmed tourist trade this year anyway – but the news was another feather in 2020’s Cap of Infamy – and a salutary reminder that paradise, tropical or otherwise, should never be taken for granted.

This being the year of the staycation, I suppose it’s not very helpful to dwell on the enduring allure of palm-fringed beaches and cocktails in coconuts. We should be accentuating the positive aspects of the UK: its roundabouts, its dry stone walls, its sheep. Not that I was in Southampton on holiday – I’m clearing out my mother’s flat at the moment. Nevertheless, after six months of essentially living out the same day over and over again, the idea of Lakaz Maman, with its joyful colour scheme, shack-attack decor (driftwood, storm lanterns, toucans) and larger-than-life menu, looked like very heaven to me.

The restaurant is the brainchild of a former Masterchef winner, Shelina Permalloo, a Sotonian of Mauritian heritage. The name translates as “mum’s house”: what’s on offer is more streetfoody than the chimerical beauties with which Permalloo will have wowed Gregg Wallace and John Torode. There are breakfasty and brunchy things, burgery things, gajaks (smallish and mostly crispy things), curries and rougailles, or lightly spiced tomato-led stews. There are many veggie and vegan dishes, not all of them involving jackfruit. It’s BYO but corkage is modest, a fiver for a bottle of wine, I think.

We arrived a little early for a 2pm booking, having worked up stevedoresized appetites thanks to a couple of runs to the charity shop, a detour to the cardboard box shop and a curious incident in which we came to the rescue of a woman who had mangled the Batmobile-grade roof retraction mechanism on her sports car by trying to operate it while the boot was occupied by, among other things, a lurid green stepladder and a large cuddly dolphin. (“We’ve been doing a photo shoot!” she said, which raised more questions than it answered, to be honest.)

Having passed the entrance exam (36.6 degrees Celsius is the answer), we were seated next to an effusion of plastic shrubbery and equipped with menus. As with other “creole” cuisines – a term I suppose we ought to hold up a little more closely to the light than we

Toucan play at that game: Lakaz Maman combines a bright colour scheme and shack-attack decor, above, with fresh, healthy food, left once did, though Lakaz Maman uses it cheerfully enough – there’s a mixture of indigenous and European elements, and a pronounced Asian influence.

Spicing is almost diffident compared with India; even the deep-fried dishes feel positively healthy (Permalloo has done a diet book). Sweetness and acidity come from lashings of fruit (pineapple, mango, tamarind), applied either directly as in pima sel, a chunky salad of apple, cucumber and pineapple dressed with chilli and a little salt, or via some fantastic sauces (which are available to buy).

Everything we had, we loved: the salad, little battered cauliflower florets, spicy mini-cakes called gato piment, a mellow coconut-creamy fish curry, rougaille with mutton, even a nonetoo-August-friendly milk dumpling, delicately spiced and served with a neat little quenelle of Mauritian vanilla ice cream, which steamed merrily in its modishly asymmetrical bowl like a vampire at daybreak.

It was intriguing to note parallels with Caribbean food (dumplings, curry with roti, plenty of chili) given that the Caribbean is, by any reckoning, a fair schlep from Mauritius; and it was a little chastening to realise that the French exerted a stronger influence on Mauritian food during their 100-odd years as the island’s colonial overlords than the British did in a century and a half.

Even if we weren’t still under wartime rules and striving to be extra-nice about everyone, I’d happily recommend Lakaz Maman. It’s full of personality and charm, and the food is vivid and exuberant. If it’s a little polite and uncomplex compared with either south Asian or Louisiana-style creole cuisine, then I suspect it’s also a lot better for you than either. LM is quite heavily branded for an independent restaurant, as if Permalloo was hoping to launch it as a chain – if and when life returns to the sector, backers could do a lot worse.

For now, they could do with your support, not least because they had to put their reopening back after a robbery in July. The story didn’t set the national press alight, so it doesn’t show up on the first page of search results, But don’t let it put you off, in any case.

22 Bedford Place, Southampton, Hants SO15 2DB: 023 806 39217; lakazmaman.com