Gastronomic travelogue: Speedboat Bar is inspired by Bangkok’s Chinatown
(Picture: Adrian Lourie)Towards the end of lunch at Speedboat Bar in Soho, I flagged down a server to try to order a coffee. “Ah,” she said, furrowing her brow a little. “So, the only coffees that we do have alcohol in them.” She pointed at something frothy and forbidding, called a Cafea Yen Turbo, and a little hundreds-and-thousands-sprinkled shooter that looked like the precise prelude to a night of karaoke bars, table-dancing, and an impulsive Thai script tattoo that regrettably turns out to be an inaccurate translation of “free spirit”.
It was a small moment but, I think, an instructive one when it comes to this place. Speedboat, which is the latest Southeast Asian-inspired collaboration between chef-grower Luke Farrell and hospitality juggernaut JKS, is exactly the sort of restaurant where even something as benign as coffee is a further inducement to mischief.
It is an adult playground of gaudy, aggressively-themed accents, lurid cocktails and roller-coaster Thai-Chinese fusion flavours quelled by tableside towers of Singha beer. It is screaming exuberance incarnate; determinedly unsubtle in a way that may even edge towards the problematic in some people’s eyes. It is also, unquestionably, one of my openings of the year.
This, of course, is not our first look at this chef’s particular style. Alongside Arcade’s Viet Populare, Bebek! Bebek! and Plaza Khao Gaeng this is Farrell’s fourth fast-tracked launch of the year (a sure sign of either his immense talent or the fact he has compromising photos of everyone at JKS). And, if I had a pre-visit worry, then it was that — having visited and loved Plaza’s infernal southern Thai curries — I wouldn’t find all that much new to dig into.
Thankfully, it didn’t take long to realise that Speedboat is in fact the more fully-realised work; an act of deepening and expanding Farrell’s culinary tricks, rather than merely repeating them. Not just in terms of the richly textured room — which turns what was once Xu into a kind of raucous, eyeball-frying Thai sports bar (complete with gilt-framed photos, blaring pop, floral carpets and an upstairs pool table). But also in the food, which manages, all at once, to feel both familiar and bracingly unexpected.
Chicken skin was essentially avian crackling: gnarly, hard-fried puffs of poultry came sprinkled in a chilli-forward ‘zaep’ seasoning that brought to mind the abominable moreishness of Pringles dust.
My memories of the rest of the meal are less about individual dishes so much as a giddy, grunting blur of pleasurable sensations
Corn fritters — with just enough spiced batter to bind them into bumpy, fryer-hot clusters — had crispness but also the succulent pop of each steamed kernel. And a ‘chicken matches’ salad comprised a whole pile-up of surprises: gnawable, lacquered half wings of bird and shreds of green mango, all united by the wincing, hot-sour punch of a kerabu dressing.
Speedboat’s food is inspired by both Yaowarat Road (essentially Bangkok’s traditional Chinatown) and Thailand’s subculture of hard-living aquatic drag racers. It is another evocative bit of gastronomic travelogue from Farrell, but it’s also usefully suggestive of the synapse-firing, breakneck experience of eating here.
My memories of the rest of the meal — scoops of moody, brow-beading minced beef with holy basil; nibbled hunks of roasted poussin in a live-wire soy bean, ginger and chilli sauce; cooling spoonfuls of rice and crisp-skirted fried egg — are less about individual dishes so much as a giddy, grunting blur of pleasurable sensations. At the end, there was safe harbour in the form of a delirious, McDonald’s-style 7-11 fried pineapple pie.
I cannot speak to Speedboat Bar’s precise authenticity. But, equally, my read on it was that it was a place of joyful, considered celebration, rather than crass, backpacker trail cosplay. It honours a specific food culture — Chinese through the prism of Thailand — that would almost certainly have been dismissed as too finicky or complicated in another dining era.
And it does so while remembering that the very best restaurants make us hunger for their attitude, storytelling and world as much as their food. I staggered out, uncaffeinated but buzzing, marvelling at Farrell and JKS’s latest, pulsating thrill-ride. And desperate, of course, for another spin.
