Archives for December 2011

Christmas at Enak Enak

December 26, 2011 By Nancy Lam Leave a Comment

We spent a lovely day at the restaurant eating Christmas lunch with family & friends. There were 12 of us. Nancy and Ben however cooked for what seemed like 30!

What was on the menu?
MAINS
Turkey (free-range from Waitrose)
Beef
Stuffing – the highlight! With chestnuts, liver, bacon
Roast Potatoes (I will report on the way we cook our crispy outside, soft inside roast potatoes in another post)
Boiled Maris Pipers from France
Parsnips
White sauce
Gravy

DESSERT
Apple Crumble
Mince Pies
Christmas Fruit Cake
Served with Custard

The Guardian Life & Style – A little place that I know

December 18, 2011 By Nancy Lam Leave a Comment

The only time I stray south of the river is to eat at this great Indonesian. Nancy’s an old mate – we go back 20 years. I love her satay and spare ribs, as well as the lobster with coconut milk, which she does as a special. It’s a real family-run restaurant, with Nancy’s husband and three daughters all working in the business.

By Marco Pierre White

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle

Evening Standard’s Mark Bolland is the Restaurant Spy

December 9, 2011 By Nancy Lam Leave a Comment

I went to New York for a couple of days last week; partly to work, partly to shop, and partly just to get away. The energy of New York is a great antidote to the relative flatness of post-Christmas London, and luckily I was there during a mini heatwave (an excellent excuse to shop even more because I had foolishly taken full winter regalia).

Like most people, I loathe this time of year and try to travel as much as possible to distract myself from the blustery wind, relentless rain and cold. It’s also a wonderful way of injecting pace into a new year, and forcing yourself to look forward. What this grey period badly needs is an explosion of life and colour (a project for our next Mayor perhaps), so when I arrived back from America I innocently set off in the direction of Lavender Hill, where I’d heard I might find some. (What could be more redolent of summer than lavender?)

If the name sounds Arcadian, the area most definitely isn’t. Although it’s named after the lavender industry that used to flourish here in the preindustrial era, there’s no longer any rustic charm or scented purple shrub in this part of South London. Just a very long and unappealing road full of shops and traffic that stretches upwards from Clapham Junction. Sarah Ferguson used to live here – but we mustn’t hold that against it.

Lavender Hill is also home to Enak Enak, an Indonesian restaurant run by the sometime TV chef Nancy Lam. The unpronounceable name is Indonesian for ‘yummy’.

B is the new A-list – particularly with chefs. Last week I ate at a place that had Ramsay’s name above the door, but you wouldn’t expect to see him there. Nancy Lam’s is, too, and you certainly can’t miss her, with her crazy hair and big smile. In fact, she’s everywhere – but not in terms of newsprint – simply happy to be working. I even saw her in Mahiki when I was there in the summer, where she’s in charge of their menu. She devotes her physical energy – and not just her name – to a project. And it works. It really works.

Despite its unprepossessing exterior, Enak Enak is a real Tardis of a restaurant – much bigger inside than out and softly lit with faux Art Deco panels that are oddly soothing. The whole place has surprisingly good feng shui, which is presumably why it is rocking with an interesting variety of diners – some local and some who clearly travel across London. The walls are adorned with photos of Nancy and her celebrity mates: various footballers, chefs, critics and media folk. The stairs carry a variety of Dennis the Menace rucksacks.

This is a temple to high camp: Judy Garland would have felt at home.

I’d taken my friend Eric Lanlard, cake-maker to the stars, who is a dashing, headturning Frenchman (known in the business as ‘Cakeboy’). He and Nancy have done a bit of TV together, so he was delighted when she blazed over to say hello, before going downstairs to cook.

We ordered Chateauneuf-du-Pape, though the icing on the cake for Eric was seeing Singha beer on the menu, which apparently he had drunk nonstop while travelling in Indonesia in the days before mortgages and business put paid to his backpacking. We started with the paper-wrapped prawns (plump, juicy and ambrosially delicious) and an unbelievably tender chicken satay, which was in a class of its own. Next we feasted on Thai green chicken, sweet and sour prawns, pak choi and the famous nasi goreng, the Indonesian version of fried rice.

You will have heard of, and probably tried, most of the dishes on the menu before but never, I’ll wager, cooked as beautifully as in the kitchen here. Your past experience of Indonesian food would be like comparing a frozen TV dinner with your mother’s Sunday roast.

Afterwards, we were tempted by banana fritters, which were crisp, melting and just the right side of sickly to be the perfect pudding.

It was a glorious hotchpotch of an evening – as uncool as could be – and even though I was miles from home, it made me ridiculously glad to be back in London. Helpful and smiling staff, including Nancy’s divine daughter, were the nicest I’ve met in a long time. Nancy greets her customers in a uniquely welcoming and positively maternal way. You could say she’s the original Yummy Mummy.

Evening Standard’s Fay Maschler dines at Enak Enak

December 9, 2011 By Nancy Lam Leave a Comment

Nancy Lam opened her Lavender Hill restaurant in 1986 with only eight tables. Interacting with force-of-nature Nancy was said to be all part of the intimate, teasing experience of her Indonesian cooking.

I never went there, despite liking her when we met at restaurant gatherings where she wore her TV celebrity lightly, if noisily.

Recently I read that she had expanded Enak Enak – meaning yummy yummy – so one day she could hand it on to her daughters, and I thought I must put right the omission.

Any idea of visiting incognito disappeared when I entered the restaurant, skulking behind the others, and Nancy bore down upon me, arms wide open, shouting: “Hello, goddess.” At least that’s what I thought she said. Customers looked rather horrified.

We were given the table of our choice, which was towards the back of the extended premises opposite the service counter where two of those aforementioned daughters, Yang Tze and Yang Mei – as doe-like and docile as Nancy is brash and vociferous – were waiting by the food lift to distribute the dishes to the new lines of tables accommodating 70.

On a Tuesday evening only a few were occupied. Perhaps not enough people realise that, after closure for expansion, Nancy’s back in town.

The food is very good, worth the price. Items like satay, invariably traduced elsewhere, have carefully and intricately composed sauces. Barbecue spare ribs are cut small from fleshy bones, finished over the char-grill and served in a spicy sauce.

Vegetables in batter deserve the description tempura and Nancy’s fragrant herbal soup would, I venture, outdo Jewish penicillin (chicken soup) in the efficacious stakes. Even the prawn crackers are proper ones.

Of the various main courses we tried, I would point you towards a beautifully spiced lamb curry; Thai Penang pork spiked with lemongrass; chicken with Thai basil, a strange liquorice flavour you have to grow to love; the vegetables with tofu, which are bright and crunchy; and the superb halibut cooked vividly in ginger, garlic and coriander.

Nancy’s home-made sorbet is made from fruits from her garden. It’s good and not too sweet. The sorbet can also accompany a pancake stuffed with coconut and brown sugar.

This confection doesn’t have a naughty name like some, such as virgin squid or cock-sucking cowboy (shot). In fact our table, disappointingly, lacked cheekiness, but at the other end of the restaurant a chap called for the bill, saying: “Bring it quick, your food has made me horny.” Gales of laughter from Nancy. The daughters, due to inherit, looked on demurely.

Meek as a Lam by A A Gill

December 6, 2011 By Nancy Lam Leave a Comment

This article was written before Enak Enak got renovated and literally only had 8 tables.

“Who the f*** are you?” the question was unexpected in the circumstances, but none the less challenging. Who the f***am I, who the f*** are any of us? I paused for a moment to consider the transcendent metaphysical depths of existence. “Go sit your bony arse over there.” Righto, I sat in my appointed rickety chair. I’m not used to being talked to like this, not by waitresses, certainly not by small, round oriental waitresses wearing spectacles that look as if they were bought from a double-glazing salesman. I realised I was sporting a vast, dim grin. There’s something rather wonderful about an overtly obscene, theatrically rude mine host. When you spend a good proportion of your life being smarmed for money by oleaginous menu shufflers, a dousing in expletives is refreshing. Nancy Lam, the dim-sum shaped proprietor of Enak Enak is the sort of woman Madama Butterfly might have become if she’d phoned the Samaratans.

After serial vomiting, rude waiters cause the most hyperventilating fury in restaurant customers. It isn’t really rudeness that lassos the goat in us all, its the suave surliness, the glacial huffiness that implies we’re playing a little charade: we’ll pretend you’re always right, but really we know that the waiter’s never wrong. It’s the intimation of “Hurry up, I’ve got better things to do” in the poise of pad and pencil. The sort of waiter who slides pat tables like a shark being pursued by pilot fish; you’re more likely to catch the Pope’s eye on Easter Sunday than his. Personally, my dander is upped by the ladling of sticky warm, overfamiliar charm: the bellissima signora, touchy-feely, three-course friend. I can’t bear phoney, servile mateyness. That’s not to say I’m not happy to chat to a manager or waiter I know, but only if I remember them, not if they think they remember me. Snobbish, moi? Heaven forfend! I’ll speak to anyone in tails and a bow tie. Nancy Lam’s rudeness is masochistically moreish in the Dame Edna way. After years of yes sir, no sir, three pasta parcels full sir, it’s great to be told to move your “fat balls” under the table and eat up.

Enak Enak is a tiny restaurant on Lavender Hill in south London. I can never take Lavender Hill seriously. I know it was invented by Ealing film-makers. Appropriately, we went as a mob. Six of us virtually filled the restaurant. It’s a tiny front room with an even tinier box for cooking stuck on the far wall. Nancy comes out and swears and then goes and cooks with a large black man. I mean, she cooks on a stove, helped by a large black man. The room has been painted and has pictures, but that is not to imply it’s been decorated: there are snaps of children pinned to the wall and shelves of the sort of ornament that Lancashire loom operators’ widows bring back from off-season cruises round the Canaries. Oh, and there are Christmas lights in the window. All together, it exudes the homely, personal warmth that consortia of wannabe restaurant-owner bankers spend hundreds of thousands failing to re-create. It’s the sort of place that, if you found its cousin in Spain or Italy, you’d coo and smirk and pat yourself on the back for having come across a real find – but Lavender Hill? You don’t really rate homely, freshly cooked, cheap simplicity, if it’s just up the road from the sybaritic splendours of Clapham Junction.

Nancy’s filthy mouth shouldn’t distract from the tasteful eloquence of her skilful hands. The food is excellent, the menu apologises that she uses the very best, freshest ingredients with love, and tells us that we are to be patient. I hate to think what sort of tongue-lashing the impatient would be subjected to. We ate almost everything on the menu, starting with those weird prawn crackers that are so addictive when they’re warm from the pan. I’ve never fathomed their precise relationship to prawns. Kissing a frog and getting a prince is nothing compared to getting a cracker out of a prawn. Next, barbecued spare ribs, meaty and exuberantly seasoned – all too often these are like chewing something that’s been nicked off the alter of a Spanish church – and satay, a little stick that’s become a noisome calvary for anonymous bits of fibre in so many vaguely oriental restaurants.

Main courses were all utterly delicious and I’m not someone who generally smacks my lips and says, “Yum, yum, Far Eastern food again.” In fact, if the world’s lemon grass crop were to be eaten by locusts, I wouldn’t give a mikado, and I wouldn’t eat the locusts, either. In fact, I think that the next person who expresses a desire to open yet another Thai restaurant in London should be forced to sing selected highlights from the King and I in the nude in front of the home crowd at Stamford Bridge. But, having said that, good food is good food, wherever you find it.

Nancy says her cooking is straight Indonesian, the sort of thing that working-class families sit down to. The spicing is long on flavour and thankfully short on heat, although she did threaten to chilli up the curries to Gotterdammerung levels (flaming ring cycle) if she got lip. I might just single out the beef curry for particular mention. Beef isn’t a meat that’s commonly used in Asian cooking, and when it is the quality invariably hideous. This was a wonderful, fall-apart dish of the best-quality rump and was a good example of the fact that cow doesn’t have to be cooked with the bloody speed of an electrocution victim to be palatable. Carbohydrates were represented by extravagantly elaborate noodles, and rice poached in stock.

Puddings are a bit of an after thought. We got a perfectly nice pancake stuffed with stuff. Nancy, despite her best efforts, turned out to be a paper tiger and actually as sweet as mango chutney. I was about to say that you can’t be a nasty person and cook well, but, now I think of it, most of the best cooks I know are simply ghastly. Nancy is a joy and reason enough for going to Lavender Hill. Her cooking is an even better one. She complained that she had to be the waitress as well as cook because the restaurant didn’t make a lot of money, and I’m afraid with only six or seven tables and most main courses costing under a fiver,the value for customers is unbeatable but the economics aren’t promising. However she’s been going for 10 years and she’s certainly not starving. As we left, she took me aside and said: “Next time, call me up before you come and I’ll make you 24-hour soup, or, better, 48-hour soup. It’s really good, really sticky, sticky as …” I couldn’t possibly tell you what she said it was as sticky as, so go and get insulted yourself. You deserve it.