Made.com vibes: the main bar area
(Picture: Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures)When last year I was arranging where to meet a friend, we erroneously settled on St Martin’s Courtyard, just off Seven Dials. “It’s weird here, isn’t it?” we muttered to each other. If you haven’t been, it’s a spot with a touch of the Basingstokes: since opening a decade ago there’s been a Bill’s, and now around the corner is Caffè Concerto. There’s also Eighties strip club survivor/shipwreck Stringfellows nearby, which is a gift, as every now and then the smokers lingering outside it begin to merge with the queue that dangles from Dishoom, and the mix of the two is, as you can imagine, quite the sight.
Which is all to say that despite its bullseye spot slap bang in the centre of town, the place has never really got going. But the deck’s been reshuffled over the past two years, and now they’re calling this bit of town The Yards, as though at any moment Vinnie Jones might park up in an old Jag with a pair of sawn-offs. I feel like Guy Ritchie had something to do with the name.
A mistake. One change decidedly for the better, on the other hand, is the addition of Lahpet, whose story would please Signor Ritchie: it is one of an East Ender(ish) done good. Before it made it here, Dan Anton partnered with Zaw Mahesh, a chef, to run a stall at Maltby Street Market, quickly hopped to London Fields as an arch-dwelling pop-up, and opened a restaurant in Shoreditch barely a year later. The pair’s food, Burmese, was a hit — a cuisine mostly yet to hit its stride in London*.
Given that, and that I’ve never been to Myanmar, I’ve no idea if Lahpet is authentic, although I imagine restaurants there don’t look like they’ve been outfitted exclusively using Made.com. I could do without the anaemic wood and the copper fetish. But then, I couldn’t do without the food, and sometimes these things come as a pair.
The falling in love went slow, and then all at once. The slow part included the yellow pea paratha arriving at the table accompanied solely by single wedge of lime garnished with what can only be described — sorry about this — as a pube of watercress. Luckily this descriptor reared its disgusting head only after I’d tucked in, which is a relief as this £7 dish, served on its own or with a cooled bottle of lager, could be the perfect lunch. The paratha, a wonderfully flaky flatbread, came crispy on the edges, pulled like a bedcover over yellow peas braised and creamy, soft and spiced with, I’d guess, garlic, onion, pepper flakes and curry paste. It warmed. It cheered.
Later came rakhine mohinga, or what they helpfully translate as fish noodle soup. Into this was tipped crispy balachaung, a dry mix of fried shrimp, garlic and ginger, red chillies and paprika. It’s meant for rice normally, as a topping, which either makes me a philistine or a maverick, maybe both.
Balachaung settled among the hoops of grilled squid and spices invading the hollows of chopped green beans
This settled among the hoops of grilled squid, bites of bream, lashing of shrimp paste, and spices all clinging to the rice noodles and invading the hollows of chopped green beans. “Hot enough?” a passing chef said mischievously when I was halfway through, and I lied and said it was fine as a groundswell of sweat broke up onto my brow. In truth it’s not heat that burns, but heat that travels, gets into the blood, makes you feel good. A cure for all ails. At the end, I scooped up balachaung in the leftover sauce, and thought fondly of childhood roasts, of the final crispy bits of potato swimming in the last of the gravy.
I ate lime and ginger ice cream as, from the other side of the restaurant, came the strains of happy birthday. On a damp midweek lunchtime. I pondered both this and an armagnac, half surprised to see it loitering among the drinks list and thought, yes, that makes sense. This is a happy place. We’re always being told to find those.
21 Slingsby Place, WC2E 9AB. Meal for two plus drinks and service, about £70. Open Monday-Saturday, noon-10pm and Sunday, noon-9pm; lahpet.co.uk/west-end
