Vittles Reviews: Almost There
The life and afterlife of three tiny Malaysian restaurants in Peckham. Words by Jonathan Nunn. Photos by Michaël Protin
Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Reviews!
Before we start, we’re excited to announce two events at the British Library! On Saturday 25th May, Vittles founding editor Jonathan Nunn will be chairing a panel on the era of restaurant writing that flourished in the late 90s and 2000s at Time Out London and how it changed the way we eat out. Jonathan will be joined by Time Out’s former food and drink editor Guy Dimond and former contributors Roopa Gulati and Anne Faber. Tickets are £5 and can be bought here.
On Sunday 26th May, Vittles editor Rebecca May Johnson will also be chairing a panel on the link between food and emotion, and how grief and loss shape and transform our relationships with food, eating, and the ways we cook. Rebecca will be in conversation with chefs Marie Mitchell, Daniel Galmiche, and the author Bee Wilson. Tickets are also £5 and can be bought here.
Vittles Reviews is a column dedicated to critical reviews of London restaurants, written by Jonathan Nunn. You can read all the previous reviews here.
Almost There
The life and afterlife of three tiny Malaysian restaurants in Peckham, by Jonathan Nunn
Like pizza in New York and tacos in Los Angeles, fried chicken is the indigenous London food that originated somewhere else. If you live in London, I can make a safe assumption that you’re familiar with the fried chicken styles and preparations of five continents. You’ve probably tried the Dominican-style pica pollo at La Barra in Elephant and Castle, a dish decorated with tostones, chicharron and bofes, a kind of jerky made from lungs, or had a takeaway from The Bread of Life Bakery in Camberwell, where the Jamaican fried chicken is so good it makes you wonder what KFC have been playing at all this time. You’ve most likely compared notes on the Korean fried chicken in New Malden: how the sweet, soy coating of the dakgangjeong at Chick and Beers tastes like those cornflake and golden syrup cakes from your childhood, or how the honey-butter chicken at Tongdak is glazed to resemble a thigh-shaped Werther’s Original. I wouldn’t even be surprised if you’d had the chicken wings at Fowl, served in a fake chicken shop box and paired with a glass of blanc-de-blancs, or the pine-salt-fried chicken at the two-Michelin-starred Clove Club, a dish so perfectly on the nose as a synecdoche of London fine dining that they’ve been unable to take it off the menu for 11 years.
But there’s every chance you haven’t tried anything like the ayam goreng susu, or ‘milk-fried chicken’ at Janda Diner in Peckham, a new two dozen-seater Malaysian restaurant tucked behind The White Horse pub at the tip of the Rye. First of all, it has no thick coating – usually a precondition for good fried chicken. Instead, it is cooked with a thin layer of cornflour and susu (condensed milk) which, when double fried – once in the deep fryer, and then in butter – leaves a kind of milky crust that tastes very much like the crispy overflow of a good cheese toastie. The fugitive sweetness of condensed milk is tempered by curry leaves, white pepper and garlic, a combo of ingredients that a culinary GeoGuessr would place somewhere in the vicinity of the Strait of Malacca. Now, I’m already a massive sucker for this accord, but when it communes with the creaminess of the milk crust and richness of the butter, it achieves something close to an apotheosis of itself. It’s almost too much, but then so much of the best of Malaysian cuisine is: almost too spicy, almost too pungent, almost too peppery. I’ve had versions of this dish before, in the Singaporean form of lai yao kei (butter chicken) but they are often too rich, too much of a good thing, like a Midwestern salad comprising chicken, cheese and cream. But here, somehow, it all works – thanks to the plate-spinning abilities of Janda’s talented chef Ady Yacob.
Janda Diner is one of three tiny Malaysian restaurants that has punched well above its weight in Peckham during the last three years. Strangely, it is the last one that remains open. The first, 7 Floor, was located in Market Place Peckham in the Aylesham Centre, whose redevelopment plans are undergoing a public consultation this week. 7 Floor was an assam laksa specialist and thrived in spite of Market Place rather than because of it, serving a seriously dank and funky laksa at odds with the usual crowd-pleasing nature of a food hall. But in London, such anomalies tend not to last too long. It’s now moved to Holborn, where it serves a mean curry mee on weekends, next to another stall called Pandan which sells curry puffs and the Malaysian dessert kuih lapis.