Review at a glance: ★★★☆☆
London is a city of little villages? Territories seems more on the mark. Folklore says you once could divvy up the streets by the families that ran them — the Krays, Richardsons, Adams. But today’s gangsters have gone to ground and so now the most visible kingdoms are ruled by restaurateurs. There’s Chris D’Sylva in Notting Hill, Samyukta Nair in Mayfair, Richard Caring on Berkeley Square. And then there’s Omar Shah, who seems to have quietly picked up the rights to half of Kentish Town Road. Not the glamour leagues, then, but an empire’s an empire.
Shah’s background is a gloriously broad one: Filipino, Bangladeshi, Christian, Muslim. He grew up among the noise and clutter of Church Street Market, then known as Little Beirut, but also in his father’s restaurant Bintang, which at the time served food from Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. Few restaurateurs can have inhaled such a breadth of influence.
Shah’s Maginhawa Group — built with chef Florence Mae Maglanoc, though she left early this year — includes Caribbean food (Guanabana, Hoodwood), but mostly sculpts Filipino to take many forms: as ice cream parlours (Mamasons); a ramen bar (Ramo); a bakery (Cafe Mama & Sons). The latest is this bistro, Belly. Even as I’m increasingly conscious of my own, I still admire the name’s call to gluttony.
Once the original Ramo, the bistro-fication has meant a fit-out that cannot have been cheap to do but unfortunately appears it. Ramo’s handsome panelling has been dumped in favour of what a Yank might call “British teeth” tiles — off-white and slightly crooked. There is no art, not even posters of the Philippines, which given the country’s pageant beauty, is baffling. There’s fraying paint. A useless side counter. Nothing wrong that’s sinister, but details have been overlooked. Things don’t hang together as they should.
A theme, it turns out. There is a discordant strangeness here, a sense of ambition not realised by execution. This does not mean there wasn’t still much to like. A piece of cod, cut to the size of a hash brown and then battered and deep-fried, was topped with a square of American cheese and tartar sauce with orange ball bearings of salmon roe. The pile sat between the sweet softness of a roll called a pandesal, toasted on the inside. A dish with a goody bag of textures: soft, sweet, sticky and crunchy all at once, and then offering that faint childish pleasure of fish eggs popping like candy on the tongue. Not an arbitrary choice, American cheese, but a nod to their Filipino occupation that began with a victory over the Spanish at the end of the 19th century.
“The wagyu steak could have resoled my Weejuns”
The Spanish influence was there too, in the caldereta — here done the European way with seafood, whereas in the Philippines meat, often goat, is preferred. It was a paprika-spiked lucky dip of squid, clams, mussels and cod, simmered in stock, wine, garlic, tomatoes. It was soothing even on a hot evening. We dipped crisp chips in for the end of the sauce.
The rest felt confused. Deep-frying is popular in the Philippines and prawns arrived that way too. But why in a heavy batter when it needed to be a light one, especially given the shells were still on? Boiled sweets would have been easier to get through. Grilled simply, then doused in the calamansi hot honey — not too sweet, with a wonderful burst of citrus — it would have been a hit. Other mistakes were less forgiveable: pandan rice with no discernable pandan, or the wagyu steak, which could have resoled my Weejuns.
Belly does not seem somewhere of cynical intentions. Staff were kind and sweet. But this meal — “a perfect order,” said the waiter, who I suddenly remember as very astute and handsome — was one of no puddings and just a carafe of Riesling. It cost £168. Some of what was here felt, if not lazy, then at least as though the kitchen hadn’t spent enough time refining its ideas or tasting the results. Dining out cannot be cheap in the way it once was. But if the industry is at the very least going to encourage people to come out more often, places need to be sharper than this. Shah may yet get things shipshape. Still going to skirt Kentish Town for a while, though.
157 Kentish Town Road, NW1 8PD. Meal for two about £170; bellylondon.com
