'London needs this delightful piri piri chicken joint' - restaurant review 'London needs this delightful piri piri chicken joint' - restaurant review Casa do Frango, 32 Southwark Street, London SE1 1TU
(020 3972 2323). Starters and sides £4-£10, chicken
£9, desserts £3-£5, wine from £20 a bottle
In the summer of 1978, while my family was on holiday
at an all-inclusive hotel in the Algarve, the
Portuguese government fell and a day's general strike
was declared. The hotel staff walked out, leaving the
family who owned the place in charge. This had no
impact, apart from on the food. It improved hugely.
Usually we got some weird version of Anglo-
continental. There really was something on the menu
called Brown Windsor soup. You looked into its depths
and saw your depraved soul reflected back at you.
Grapefruit came grilled with brown sugar, and meats
were tortured by coagulating mushroom sauces.
Not on the day of the general strike. The aged
matriarch had taken over the kitchen. Waiter service
was abandoned and we were invited to help ourselves
from a buffet. And oh, what a buffet. There were huge
bowls of sweet-salty clams that left our hands
smelling of the sea. There were crisp green salads
and piles of a charred sausage the deep reddy-brown
of a blood clot. I had never before met this thing
called chorizo, but I quickly decided we would be
friends forever. Best of all was the grilled chicken
with its crisp, lightly charred, fiery skin,
marinated in piri piri, the sauce made from African
chillies and garlic and salt and oil, and all the
good stuff. I wanted every day to be general strike
day, but like the coma patients in Awakenings, we
soon sunk back into the dark, morbid slough of Brown
Windsor and grilled grapefruit.
Years later, when I moved to Brixton, I found my way
to a piri piri grill house on the road to Streatham.
I had driven by it for a couple of years and sniffed
the heady mix of charcoal and flamed chicken fat on
the air before stopping to find out whether what they
were cooking tasted as good as it smelled. It did.
For years, when asked what my favourite restaurant
was I regularly named that place, based on how often
I ate their food. I got a takeaway from there once or
twice a month. I loved the knobbly promise of the
charred and smoky chicken felt through its foil-paper
bag, where it rested on the journey home. I knew I
could get the same thing on nearby South Lambeth
Road, the focus of London's Portuguese community. But
this was my place. They knew me. They knew I liked
the medium piri piri sauce and a little extra flame.
Eventually one owner died, the other retired, and
standards fell. I tried to stay loyal, but loyalty
didn't make it taste good. It was no longer the same.
I tried Nando's. Of course I did. I have a lot of
time for Nando's. If it wasn't for their bottomless
soft drinks policy they'd be the healthiest of the
high street chains, and they reach demographics
others simply do not reach. I just find their chicken
unreliable. Too often it's terribly dry. Dry piri
piri chicken is a sad thing, in need of mourning.
Even so I was doubtful about the need for a
restaurant like Casa do Frango, which apparently
would bring the best of the Algarve kitchen in
general and of piri piri chicken in particular to
London. Do we really need another piri piri chicken
joint here? Surely we're overrun with them. The
answer is, yes, we do. We need this one. It's
delightful.
Casa do Frango - it means chicken house - occupies a
huge, airy space hard by Borough Market
(incidentally, above the new home to the also
admirable Native). It is effortless shabby chic, of
the sort set designers strain to create: there are
brick walls, distressed here and there with scraped
paint, a big, airy vault of a glass-ceilinged roof,
tendrils of foliage as if nature were trying to
reclaim it, and massive open windows lending it an
inside-out feel. I have no idea what it will be like
in winter, but on a summer's evening it is just the
thing.
The menu is split between small plates to start and
mains which are anything you like, as long as it's
chicken. Of the small plates the star is the
gazpacho, which is what the version at the Painswick
was aiming for and missed. It's less a cold soup than
a thick, rustic stew roughly blitzed and full of
garlic astringency and sunshine. You will want to
share it and your garlic breath with a close friend.
The right kind of grilled chorizo comes with vinegary
pickled peppers and a black olive mayo. Grilled
prawns are substantial specimens with lots of good
head-suckage potential.
And then there's the main event. On the website they
say the chickens are "sourced locally" which I'm
going to take literally to mean they bought them in
the next-door market. A chicken actually raised in
Bermondsey doesn't bear thinking about. They are
small, meaty, very flavourful and, at £9 a half, good
value. There are three marinade options, though if
you don't want the piri piri I'm not sure why you'd
come. It's salty and spicy in all the right places.
The chips are good, the tomato salad fresh and well
dressed and for fun there's the African rice, planted
with shards of crisp chicken skin. Rice with crispy
chicken skin sounds to me like a great night out.
Miraculously, they even make their own nata, or
custard tarts. Almost nobody in London does that.
They just get them in from Madeira Patisserie. To be
fair to Madeira the ones here, while great, that
perfect mix of flaky caramelised pastry and deep eggy
custard, are no better than theirs. From an entirely
Portuguese list we drink a bright, grassy Vinho Verde
which fizzes away delicately on our chilli-singed
tongues. They don't take bookings for small groups,
and you may end up on a communal table, but that
rather suits Casa do Frango. This is an elbows-out,
face-down job, which gently wafted me back to the
summer of '78.
A quick note on pricing. For years I've listed the
full cost of a three-course meal with wine and
service for two, so you'd know how much you'd have to
spend on the works. But going by comments on these
reviews, some people seem incapable of grasping that
it's the full whack and that it could easily cost
less. Oh, how they whine. From now on, therefore, I'm
giving the general span of pricing across various
courses, and you can all work it out for yourselves.
Let's see how that goes.
Jay's news bites
El Gato Negro, which moved from Ripponden to
Manchester not long ago, gets the nod here, because
it's shortly to open Canto, a new Portuguese
restaurant. The mothership is an avowedly Spanish
tapas place, and a very good one: alongside the
standards - Padrón peppers, chorizo in cider -
there's morcilla Scotch eggs and pork ribs glazed
with Pedro Ximénez (elgatonegrotapas.com).
Meanwhile, Manchester is about to welcome its
expanding food and drink festival, from 27 September
to 8 October. The free-to-enter festival hub on
Albert Square, a focus for talks and demos, will be
supplemented by events across the city including a
jazz gig from some big-haired Observer food critic.
But that's sold out (foodanddrinkfestival.com).
To make up the shortfall in skilled Chinese chefs in
the UK a consortium led by the Chichester College
Group here and the Tianjin Second School of Cuisine
in China, has launched Britain's first Chinese food
diploma. The course will include online webinars and
practical assessments.
|
Popular
SPORTS NOTES
TRADE NOTES
|