Xu, Som Saa and Ikoyi are three of the most fêted new restaurant openings in Britain. Xu is Taiwanese, bringing the style of old Taipei to central London. Som Saa in Spitalfields serves Thai food as you might find it in Thailand, without a bland red or green curry in sight. Ikoyi in Piccadilly, the newest of the three, riffs expansively on traditional West African flavours. Three very different restaurants, and yet what they have in common are dishes that might once simply have been described as “spicy”. In fact, all three menus have options apt to blow the socks off the unsuspecting.
The past few decades have been a crash course in capsaicin for the British palate. The scale used to be simple: there was vindaloo at one end and korma at the other. This system has been rendered sadly inadequate by the evolution of Britain’s restaurant scene. Diners are being introduced to the full variety of spice that life has to offer, but how do each of these restaurants create their unique profiles?
“Learning about West African flavours, it was obvious to me from the start that it’s unlike Thai or Indian or any other kind of spice,” says Jeremy Chan, head chef at Ikoyi. “It has a very aggressive start, and you’re punched in the face much more quickly than with other cuisines. It has a back-of-the-throat burn to it.”
At the heart of this style of cooking are peppercorns and the Scotch Bonnet chilli. This pepper has a Scoville rating of at least 100,000, compared to a jalapeño’s relatively paltry 8,000. The plantain starter at Ikoyi has quickly established a cult reputation, partly because of how Chan plays with expectations. Slices of plantain are served dusted with dried, crushed raspberries alongside an innocuous looking dollop of sauce. Guests assume the angry-looking Martian dust is causing the heat, and reach for the emulsion to cool down. How wrong they are.
“We burn the Scotch Bonnets until they are black and then infuse them in oil for 48 hours,” says Chan. “Then we emulsify them into a kind of mayonnaise, and use a sweet, aromatic pickling juice which has been infused with the same chillies. I wanted to flip the idea of heat on its head, wake people up and set the pace for what’s to come.”
At Xu, Erchen Chang and her team make more use of Sichuan peppercorns, which as well as having a potent citrus flavour, create a tingling sensation on the lips rather than searing the back of the throat. The numbing effect is prevalent in Sichuan Chinese cooking. One signature dish is their beef tendon, which is flavoured with Sichuan infused oils along with star anise, garlic and ginger.
“It’s not just a taste, there’s a smell, too. The heat adds another level to the dish,” she adds. “The sensation lingers and you feel like you’re drunk, in a way. Then you get really sweaty.” The only menu item they have amended for London tastes was a chilli crab. “You couldn’t taste all the hard work that had gone into the dish,” she says. “So we took out some of the Sichuan pepper and added more ginger. Ginger is spicy, too, but in a different way.”
Thailand’s cuisine varies greatly from region to region, so the heat and spice profiles of dishes vary depending on whether it’s drawing on a Chinese, Indian or Burmese influence. For Som Saa’s head chef Andy Oliver this means a wide range of chillies. “There are some ferociously hot ones which we use in the curries, but in other dishes it’s used more like a fruit or vegetable, cut in a way that the heat comes out of it. There are also plenty of dried spices: the massaman curry uses something like 15.”
Part of the waiters’ job is to gently inform the customers what they’re letting themselves in for. “Sometimes that’s our most important job,” Oliver says, “to explain that even though it says it’s a curry, it has all these extremely strong flavours. If they want a crowd-pleaser, we can try to drive them in that direction, but if they want to try a really challenging dish, there are options there, too.” And as this wave of brilliant new restaurants shows, some really do like it hot.
