#IR2: Papers Love Mambow

Welcome to the second edition of In Review

Caitlin Isola/Mambow

This edition of In Review brings with it more housekeeping: the return of free newsletters!

As before, they will digest the best of food media, with occasional forays into reviewing and other cultural criticism. You’ll always get good links, they might just come at the end once in a while.

In Review is the paid subscriber portion of In Digestion, but the introduction and first piece of the week will always be above the paywall.

If you are an existing paid subscriber who signed up due to the interviews, and don’t find this appealing, that’s all good. Please get in touch and I will sort you out.

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David Ellis | The Evening Standard

Mambow, London (Zone 2)

“This place is so hard to get to” is the preferred trope of the London restaurant writer. Whether in Giles Coren’s seminally abject account of the “murder train” from Kentish Town to Peckham Rye; the characterisation of precisely grilling masgouf over coals in Park Royal as “a fish roasted over an exhaust pipe on the far side of the M25”; or any other review of a restaurant in Peckham, actually, exiting Zone 1 is routinely characterised as some kind of noble or heraldic duty for people whose exact role is, purportedly, to cover London restaurants.

This wouldn’t be a problem if going to Mayfair, Soho, or Covent Garden got characterised as a schlep on occasion, but things are never thus. So to new Clapton restaurant, Mambow, which chef-owner Abby Lee has relocated from Peckham, and a schlep for David Ellis, filling in for Jimi Famurewa.

Mambow’s playful hybridity of Nyonya and other regional Malaysian cuisines with Lee’s experience of London has been a hit, and so too here, with a four-star conclusion and praise for just about every dish. Less fortunately, the other favourite trope of the London restaurant writer rears its head: This food? It’s hot. There is chilli in it. Did you know you can use fire adjectives in food writing? You can.

Here, it’s a “wildfire,” which like the schlep trope should only be really thought about in relative terms, rather than declaring anything adjacent to a peppercorn as infernal. However, Ellis rightly notes that “spice is layered for detail, not distraction,” and we never approach the collective response to Luke Farrell’s Plaza Khao Gaeng, which saw more fire and “hot face” emojis than both critical substance and Adam Levine’s outgoing DMs.

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After the paywall:

• How another rave review of Mambow reveals the circumscriptions even praise can impose.

• What the other critics have been up to this week.

• Why the King’s stepson might be feeling a little irregular