Tong Kanom Thai (Thai)
Above: Tong Kanom Thai: where 'fine food and aromatherapy collide'
This review will make one group of people very angry, for which I profoundly apologise. There are some restaurants that inspire a fierce secrecy amongst their patrons, places which have such good food and so few tables at which to eat it that any mention of their merits in the press is abhorred by those who already know about it.
Tong Kanom Thai is such a place. Close your eyes as fragrant wafts of lemongrass, fish sauce, coconut and galangal caress your nostrils, and you could be lying on a beach by the Gulf of Thailand.
Actually, you would have to shut your eyes very tightly indeed: part of the restaurant’s relative anonymity springs from its location on perhaps the dreariest part of Harrow Road. Inside, however, it is a jolly little room which will delight fans of Asian kitsch. The menu is much longer than it was when I first ate there, seven or eight years ago, and I have yet to find any real duds. Gai bai toey six marinated chunks of chicken, wrapped in strips of pandan leaf and deep-fried is a favourite, served with a sweet chilli dip. It is deeply moreish: I have never eaten at Tong Kanom Thai without it.
Thai cuisine has, over the past 20 years, been thoroughly emasculated in Britain. Pungent, vibrant aromas and flavours have made way for crunchy brown deep-fried stuff served with a vaguely chilli-flavoured ketchup. Everything is much too sweet, and fermented fish paste and fish sauce, essential to Thai food, are missing. The resulting mish-mash cuisine is blandly unbalanced.
Not, I am pleased to say, at Tong Kanom Thai, where fine food and aromatherapy collide. Yum nuea, a grilled beef salad with herbs, is a tangle
of Thai basil, coriander and salad leaves with marinated beef, dressed with lemon juice and fish sauce. Bracing and thoroughly delicious.
Som tam, the classic Thai green papaya salad is properly sour, hot and crunchy. Roast duck curry, made with coconut, pineapple and lychees, is inevitably sweet, but spiked with aniseed-like Thai basil and clean, citric lime leaf.
The menu rewards the adventurous. Steer clear of spring rolls and stir-fries (good though they are) and try, instead, lightly-battered tilapia fillets, still miraculously crunchy, despite being bathed in a light, fragrant sauce and strewn with herbs.
With the honourable (but expensive) exception of David Thompson’s superb Nahm, in the Halkin Hotel, Tong Kanom Thai serves the best Thai food I have tasted this side of the Indian Ocean. Prices hover around £5 a dish, which is ridiculously cheap. It is also unlicensed: you can splash out on a classy bottle of Riesling and still spend less than £40 for two, although do not rely on finding a local off-licence. My apologies, once again, to the regulars.Bill Knott
Tong Kanom Thai, 833 Harrow Road, Kensal Green, NW10 5NH
020 8964 5373