Restaurants

By Charmaine Mok

Last year, Rosa’s in Whitechapel impressed us with its solid approach to Thai cooking – fresh, distinct flavours simply presented. A second branch will open at 48 Dean Street in the new year, but in the meantime Noodles – from the same Thai people – is ‘keeping the place warm’.

The tiny space could be mistaken for an art gallery – lightbulbs spell out the café’s name in the window while one wall is decorated with words cut out from sheets of wood in various fonts: ‘massaman beef curry’, ‘lamb & rice’ and, of course, ‘Rosa’s’. A communal table is the centrepiece, though there are a few cosy tables à deux at the back.

You could think of the place as ‘Rosa’s Lite’, as the menu reads similarly with a short selection of traditional Thai dishes – lots of curries and classic starters, such as som tum, satay and spring rolls. We enjoyed the dance of flavours in a soft shell crab salad : sweet and sour offset by aromatic coriander and celery leaf, and the sharpness of crisp raw onions.

Gaeng gari gaeh (a yellow curry with lamb, on the menu as ‘gen gari lamb’) and seafood hor mok (a steamed curry) were poorly explained by our waiters, who struggled to find the words. But both dishes were presented beautifully.

The hor mok was a loose interpretation of the dish (a steamed seafood mousse served traditionally in banana leaves), being a more liquid, grainy-textured curry set in the bulbous bottom half of a sweet butternut squash. It had the pleasing whiff of lemongrass and contained fat scallops, prawns, squid and white fish, but lacked depth.

Likewise, our lamb curry, a hearty serving of tender chunks of meat with carrots and potatoes and crisp fried shallots, which was rich with coconut but not much else. The cooking is at that point where it’s nearly there, but not quite – more of a beta version than the real deal.

Time Out London Issue 2048: November 19-25 2009