Smoking Goat Shoreditch: Ambitious twist on Thai goes east

Solving its teething problems would provide added bite, says our restaurant critic
Holy smoke: Thai barbecue finds a new home in Shoreditch
Adrian Lourie
Fay Maschler12 December 2017

Both times I go to Smoking Goat, I invite with me embryonic fans. John is mad about Kiln in Brewer Street and Max digs Smoking Goat in Denmark Street — actually, I feel much the same way — Soho restaurants that are in the same ownership as this conversion of what was a family-run pub, The White Horse, where strippers once stripped.

“Nu-Thai” is what the cool kids call it, I am told, food from white boys who have travelled widely in South-East Asia, read studiously their copies of Andy Ricker’s Pok Pok: The Drinking Food of Thailand and touched the hem of David Thompson — who could be said to have started it all at Darley Street Thai in Sydney.

This outlet is flagged as inspired by “the late-night canteens of Bangkok”. Unversed in these establishments, I assume that the pastel-coloured plastic plates and shallow bowls dealt out before food arrives are a signifier, a sort of stand-in for cheap rickety tables, pungent heat and butane gaslights. Or they could be the fall-out from a closed-down Sure Start nursery nearby. They contrast oddly with handsome sturdy wooden fixtures and fittings of the long bar and surrounding seating.

On arriving for dinner I have my foot one millimetre through the tall, forbidding door when a face in front of mine asks: “Do you have a booking?” It serves to underline the many thousands of miles that separate Bangkok from London. “They purportedly have a pro-walk-in policy,” remarks John, mildly. “It makes me wonder what the welcome would be like if they had an anti-walk-in policy.” Still, new place, groovy food, stripper ghosts, Shoreditch, buzz, buzz, buzz.

The menu section entitled Drinking Foods — the equivalent of starters — kicks off with larb-spiced chicken heart skewers at £1.40 each. Agreeable, oozy, not as vampiric as the description might conjure, along with small cubes of Tamworth pork interspersed with matching cubes of pork fat (£1.60) and a Menai oyster topped with roasted chillies, nuts and leaves (£3.50) — arguably more stuff on top than it can bear — they are drink-accompanying twiddles, reasons to order cocktails such as rye and green chilli.

Northern Thai-style beef sausage is judged soggier and less vivid than the smoked sausage with turmeric at Kiln, the establishment that is invoked and praised more than once for comparative precision of preparation. Northern Thai-style duck larb is a sprauncy assembly, glistening, quite labyrinthine, shocking when a mouse shit chilli, aka prik kee noo suan, lurks in a mouthful. Barbecue goat massaman needs longer, slower cooking so that meat falls from the bone rather than having to be prised off. Soukhy spicing makes it stand out from other conventionally Thai dishes.

Flavours in the shiny mass of smoked brisket drunken noodles sing out distinctly

At dinner, the best of what we try is smoked brisket drunken noodles, where flavours in the slippery, shiny mass sing out distinctly and call for another bottle of wine from the beguiling list compiled by Zeren Wilson, in this instance Petit Verdot 2015 released grudgingly — it is a small harvest bottled unfiltered — from Mornington Peninsula, Australia, by Bill Downie. From Sides, lardo fried rice is essential for voluptuousness, jasmine rice for its soothing ability.

Lunchtime is quieter, hardly a surprise. Plenty of tables are available but we are steered to one right beside the door, which regularly admits blasts of cold air. A curtain would help. The nine dishes we order arrive within 10 minutes, so most are cold by the time we eat them, which doesn’t fulfil the menu’s promise of comfort food. Congealed fried eggs are a particular slap in the face. One solution is to order in fits and starts. Another is for someone in or out of the kitchen to control the flow but this may well be contrary to Bangkok canteen spirit…

D’tom yam wild mussels velvet crab has a haunting stock but the metal bowl is crowded with items that are fundamentally unapproachable — huge, hard chunks of ginger, chopped up swimming crab (once considered a pest) with no means of excavation, whole chillies, large slices of Bangladeshi limes. “This gives one a face like a bulldog chewing a wasp,” says Max. We scrupulously share the four mussels, which are delicious.

Fay Maschler's 50 favourite restaurants in London

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Half a soya-braised chicken is a treat, the flesh of the bird imbued with flavour. Lardo fried rice scores again as an ideal dance partner. Economy curry — basically curry sauce with a few vegetables and no protein — would be ace with the fried eggs in their frilly carapace thrown up by deep oil if only they weren’t stone cold.

We fancy something sweet or some fresh fruit but are told that desserts are still “under development”. How about some Gelupo ice cream, meanwhile? I get the feeling that the operation is almost paralysed by the notion of authenticity and that if the management was able to confront the fact that here is a quite swanky Shoreditch restaurant proclaiming quite rightly its virtuous sourcing, it would swing more merrily. Acknowledging that we are not in Bangkok, we go across the road to Tesco to buy a tube of Rowntree’s Fruit Pastilles for the journey home.

64 Shoreditch High Street, E1 (smokinggoatbar.com). Kitchen hours: Mon-Fri noon-3pm & 5.30pm-11pm. Sat & Sun noon-11pm. A meal for two with wine, about £95 including 12.5 per cent service

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