Laksamania

Laksa is the soup du jour: we can’t get enough of the stuff. So the opening of a place specialising in this spiced noodle soup, a mere busker’s warble from Oxford Street, was bound to draw the masses. Sure enough, on our midweek visit, it was busy: by the time we left, there was a queue.

It's easy to see the appeal: the space is more attractive than the cheesy name implies, the staff are sweet-natured, the portions huge. As for the laksa itself, it's not any better than something you'd make at home, but perhaps that's part of its charm. We liked our ipoh curry laksa, its creamy-with-a-kick coconut soup base packed with two kinds of noodles, triangles of bouncy fish cake, mussels, barbecue pork and a boiled egg.

But the menu goes well beyond laksa, taking in more Malaysian street food, plus crowd-pleasers from other parts of Asia (Chinese bao, Japanese udon). Our char keuy teow saw wide, slippery noodles studded with fatty pork morsels and large (if slightly tough) prawns; a plate of kong kong (Chinese water spinach) was salty and fiery. It's a pity the nyonya curry chicken was bland and the roti canai dry and crumbly, rather than buttery and stretchy.

It's no destination, but a friendly pitstop? Laksa-lutely.