Review at a glance: ★★★★☆
Lai Rai — was it born of a Wes Anderson movie or a computer game? From its ordered red and white frontage it wouldn’t surprise if either Owen Wilson or one of the GTA crooks emerged. On this part of Peckham’s Rye Lane — a world of street barbecues and money transfer shops, of cash and carrys and mobile repair booths — it is an apparition, as crisp and neat as a striped shirt still in its packet. It draws admiring, inquisitive stares; boys riding on their bikes stop, couples double back. A man with holes in his varsity jumper pulled out a Leica and snapped.
Inside is more of the same. It is mostly butter yellow though the red of 1950s diners and tinned sardines is everywhere: the pin-thin neon strip lights; the metal stools; the chopsticks; even the grout between the tiles. It looks faintly make-believe, but has the feeling of being the place to be. Huddled over the small tables are young dates, cool kids; lots of statement frame glasses and nipple piercings. We sat in the window. Great view if you like graffiti.
Lai Rai comes in two guises: “Ca phe by day, bia ho’i by night” is a motto. Or: coffee when it’s light, beer when it’s dark. A Vietnamese café from 11am-3pm, in the evenings it becomes a satay-scented canteen. Little by little, the name means, but it’s slang, too, for those laughing nights with friends that blear into soft focus over maundering conversations; a little to eat, a bit to drink. Pick at a few bites, staff suggest.
Sharing plates aren’t dead yet, then. There aren’t hard choices to make: it is a short, neat menu, and with four at a table it could be ordered in its entirety. With two, restraint is advised: with us, one small plate, three bigger and two sides vaporised our capacity for pudding. Almost as if, actually, we might have just ordered a starter and main…
Ach, who cares? Especially when the food is as it is. Lai Rai’s owners are a quintet of siblings who operate under the Bánh Bánh banner (bánher?). They are not short on smarts and wisely had Blair Nguyen, of South East London rave/food hybrid Vinaxoa, design the menu. It is mostly triumphant. Rice, cooked into puffs, decorated a lollipop of mashed prawn, flavoured with both a vinegar-heavy herb sauce and fish satay. Instead of a length of wood, the prawn had been worked around a finger of sugar cane; no jokes imprinted, but an in-built honeyed palette cleanser.
Bánh tráng tron — rice paper salad sounds so much less attractive — arrived on an oval of steel: a nest of beef jerky, green mango and fried onions, dotted with quail eggs in half. It was rich and sweet and beautiful, and sour too — a contradiction of a dish, then, and not just in flavour but texture, bite by bite both comfortingly soft and bracingly crisp. We had ordered expecting it as a side, but it turned up alone, needing nothing to complete it.
Lai Rai’s speciality, it turns out, is food you cannot get enough of
After came mussels with lengths of that red tone again — chilli this time — and cheerfully reeking of lemongrass and mint. Clinging loyally to their shell, mussels with chopsticks proved not to be for the cack-handed. No matter, we took to our fingers and gulped them down with a swivel-eyed hunger. Lai Rai’s speciality, it turns out, is food you cannot get enough of.
On we ploughed, sipping Top Cuvée white and Saigon Specials, to a pair of well-knit beef patties. Betel leaf, diced in with the beef, added a vaguely medicinal edge. Not unwelcome, this; its antiseptic spice played with the coffee-laden barbecue sauce. It felt thrillingly unfamiliar.
Not true for the twice-fried but unremarkable chicken leg that followed. Staff seemed very keen on it. It is hard to be sure, now, if it really was dull or just seemed it in relief against what else was eaten. Lai Rai may do what it perceives as basics — Vietnamese street food doled out with lagers — but it is executed with an expertise that feels precociously innovative. The familiarity of the chicken, then, felt misplaced.
With just four mains, the brilliance of Lai Rai will depend on how often its fairly priced menu is updated. It is something to keep an eye on. In the meantime, among the dilapidation of Peckham, it stands as an oasis. It could even be a movie star.
181 Rye Lane, SE15 4TP. Meal for two about £120; @lairai.london
