Bali Satay House, 4-5 Western Parade, Great North Road, New Barnet
EN5 1AD (020 8449 0396). Starters £7.45-£12, mains £14.95-£22.50, desserts £8.45, wines from £20.45, Indonesian beer £6.45
It’s music night at the Bali Satay House in New Barnet and the vocal guitar duo’s power ballad game is strong. A bit of Whitney gives way to Michael Jackson, via a segue into The Girl from Ipanema. Tall and tan and young and lovely she may well be, but I can’t lie. Her passing by is not making me go “Ah”, because it’s a little hard for me to focus on my delightful fried sea bass. The more senior quartet of diners to my right is in active, if very polite, suburban revolt. They have complained to the waiter that they can no longer hear themselves think, let alone what each other has to say. Never fear, for the waiters are attentive to their customers’ needs. The live music is turned down. Dissent dissipates. Contentment reigns anew.
As a diehard south Londoner, I feel tonight like I am a very long way off my patch, here on the unpromising edge of the Great North Road, as it labours to escape north London. True, I am employed to travel great distances just to eat. I once flew to Inverness for lunch. On another occasion I took three trains west across Wales just for dinner. But this trip, to the very northern tip of the Northern line and then a 10-minute walk down a dark suburban trunk road, feels more intrepid than most.
At the end of a journey which would be worthy of Odysseus if he owned an Oyster card, I reach a brightly lit, white-walled dining room, clad in intricate toffee-coloured Balinese textiles. The chairs are dressed in the same material right down to the wood-effect tiled floor as are the tables so that, once seated, it fills my field of vision. I fantasise for a moment about getting a suit made from a bolt of this gorgeous cloth. I could sit here and disappear from view, like a lion in the Serengeti. There are dangly lamps, a couple of faux living walls over by the loos and a little basket-wear, hung as decoration. All the serious action will be on the table in front of us.
The Bali Satay House was recommended to me by a reader who saw it as a companion to Supawan Thai in King’s Cross, a family-run restaurant with a menu that dives deeper than most into unfamiliar parts of the Thai repertoire. It’s a point well made. Tonight’s menu contains familiar words, but the dishes they represent are less so. It starts with lacy, friable peanut crackers, still warm from the fryer, with the breathy aromatics of lemongrass. On the side is a fierce chilli-hot sambal, which invites my diaphragm to go into spasmodic hiccups. (Tell me: what’s your hiccup cure? Mine is to take a deep breath and then imagine there’s a balloon of air which I’m pressing down on into my chest. I think it’s the focus that halts the spasms rather than anything else, but it works for me. In my highly risky line of work, I find this a useful strategy.)
As befits the name of the restaurant, the satay list is lengthy. Each of them arrives in a pottery platter placed in turn on an ornate brown ceramic burner so that many of the dishes become not just dinner, but also centrepiece. The mackerel satay appear as spiced fishcakes, formed on sticks and then fried. They come with coarsely chopped fresh onion and bird’s eye chillies with crispy onion. It’s a fun dish to chat over. The chicken satay, however, is the best kind of brown food, the sort of dish you keep glancing at, as if it’s waving at you. The smoky grilled chunks of thigh come under a blanket of sauce-cum-coarsely chopped peanut stew. It is the colour of varnished antique oak. It is both sweet and salty, and rich with spiced caramel tones. The chicken is great. It deserves all the good words like “tender” and “charred”. But it is only a supporting actor to the star of this show, the intense satay. I want to take a bucket of this stuff home with me and introduce it to everything I happen to have lurking in my fridge right now.
For all its interest in chicken, lamb and beef, the menu is strong on plant-based options. We have deep-fried sweetcorn fritters, which remind me of similar dishes in the repertoire of Myanmar, the heat-blistered kernels bursting out of their skins amid the batter matrix. They are scattered with chopped spring onions and served with more of the perky sambal, which is weirdly addictive now the hiccups have subsided. Among the vegan mains, alongside tofu and seitan dishes, is a hefty salad of cucumber, chopped green beans, basil and green aubergine bound by a thick peanut and coconut milk dressing. It arrives surrounded by crackers and is very much salad as main event.
It’s a good foil to the galangal-rich beef rendang, in its thick, glossy gravy. If you are one of those who prize a rendang for the crisped, friable edges and corners cooked out at the bottom of a hot pan, among whose number I count myself, be aware: you won’t find that here. It is a softer, soupier version, but with huge depths. The chopped fresh red chilli is there to provide any fire you might crave. Finally, alongside a dome of sesame seed-flecked jasmine rice, is the flash-fried fillet of sea bass in a sweet-sour sauce. The skin is crisp. The flesh is bronzed around the edges. Egged on by the staff in their Balinese shirts, we are having a very nice time.
For dessert we are pointed towards banana fritters with honey, which are a little batter-heavy and solid. The pleasingly grainy coconut ice-cream, made here, helps send them on their way. Far better are fried, sesame-crusted dumplings made with sweet potato and filled with an ooze of brown sugar caramel. To go with this there’s Indonesian beer, Swedish cider and an offer on spirits that is clearly aimed at those who don’t have to get up in the morning.
The second set has now begun and the duo are exploring the 80s back catalogue with uncompromising vigour. On principle and out of solidarity with musicians, I can never object to live music anywhere, but for those who are less keen the website says it happens every Thursday. On Wednesdays, it’s Balinese dancing. That also sounds like fun. In truth, though, just as with the decor, the real entertainment is always going to be provided by the food.
News bites
Members of the Jewish community in Margate have come together with hospitality and other businesses in the town who were planning a fundraising drive to aid humanitarian work in Gaza, and instead together have launched a crowdfunder raising money for groups pursuing peace and humanitarian initiatives on both sides of the Israel-Gaza divide. It’s focused on a Feast for Peace, next Wednesday, 31 January, at the Curve Coffee Store in Margate, featuring dishes from across the region, but there is also a range of raffle prizes. To buy tickets for the dinner and raffle prizes, or simply to donate go here.
The Ottolenghi restaurant group is planning its first opening outside London, with a new restaurant and deli planned for a former Pain Quotidien site in Bicester Village, Oxfordshire. The business, fronted by chef and writer Yotam Ottolenghi, has just opened its sixth deli in Hampstead, London. Ottolenghi has also said he is eyeing international expansion with an outpost planned for Paris (ottolenghi.co.uk).
Gary Townsend, the former head chef of One Devonshire Gardens in Glasgow, is to open his own restaurant in the city, with a £400,000 investment. The 40-cover Elements will be on New Kirk Road in the suburb of Bearsden and will serve a four-course menu at lunch and both a tasting menu and à la carte in the evenings, using ingredients from across Scotland (elementsgla.com).
• This article was amended on 28 January 2024 because an earlier picture caption misnamed the dish onde onde as ubi goreng.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on X @jayrayner1
