See Cafe (Asian)
Above: Cafe, deli and retaurant See Cafe in Praed Street, W2, serves pan-Asian cuisine
The latest restaurant to open in the Paddington Basin development – this time at the Edgware Road end of Praed Street – is See Café, a cheerful and lively place which is simultaneously a café, restaurant and Asian deli. At lunchtime, the deli is full of local workers feasting on healthy, tasty salads and noodle dishes; in the evening, a more relaxed atmosphere takes hold, with a few pleasant well-spaced tables for alfresco dining by the canal, and a calm, low-lit dining-room.
The menu is pan-Asian, a concept which often strikes fear into my stomach, but it is – for the most part – well-executed and it is notably good value. Salads are vibrantly flavoured and very fresh: the best was a som tum, made with cabbage and carrot rather than green papaya, but pungently spiked with fish sauce and crunchy with crushed peanuts.
The short range of dim sum includes decent siu mai and har gau, and some excellent scallop dumplings featuring crisp prawns in a soothingly soft bun. A little bowl of sour chilli sauce and roasted chilli sauce would have been welcome: only the latter was present, on a dish with a Thai sweet chilli sauce and some chopped green chillies.
This points up one of the pan-Asian problems: cutlery and crockery vary hugely from culture to culture and make setting the table rather tricky. Spoon and fork for the Thais, chopsticks for the Chinese, thinner chopsticks for the Japanese, naan bread for the Indians… where will it all end?
Actually, the Indian dish came as a bit of a surprise, since ‘red chicken curry’ invariably means Thai these days. It was actually more like a Keralan curry, the sauce fragrant with curry leaf, not lime leaf. Surprise or not, it was jolly good.
As was salmon teriyaki, which was – for farmed salmon, especially – a fine chunk of fish, fragrant and sweet. The char siu pork, sadly, was a bit of a duffer: rather dry and sweet, and nothing like – for example – the aristocratic piggy served at Kam Tong, on Queensway.
A short wine list is well chosen – I recommend the Sicilian syrah. Service is friendly, if a little distrait at times: knowing which of the ice creams and sorbets from the excellent Minghella are available would be useful, as would knowing which are ice creams and which are sorbets.
That is a minor quibble, though: See Café is a lovely little place with a clear desire to do things properly. Like most of the Paddington Basin restaurants, it tends to be quiet at night, partly because it is rather tricky to find, partly because the development does not seem to have any residents yet. When they finally move in, I suspect they will be very happy with their local cafe. Bill Knott
Dinner for two with wine, around £50
See Café, 4d Praed Street, Paddington, W2 1JX
020 7724 7358