THREE weeks on from the launch of Channel 5 and what have we got? A lot of young people, that’s what. It’s the one thing you can’t help but notice – all the presenters are really young. Switch it on at any time of the day or night and you’ll find a young man in a bright shirt bringing you the latest news or a young woman with a big smile telling you the latest showbiz gossip. The main newsreader is even called Kirsty Young, which is surely more than coincidence.

And of course they’re all very nice and well-meaning, and they’re easy on the eye (although I have to say I have a difficulty with a news bulletin delivered by some callow youth wearing hair gel). But you do end up with the rather worrying impression that the gene pool has shrunk to the extent that the world is peopled by earnest youngsters with a mission to be polite.

Thankfully, being polite is the one thing Nancy Lam could never be accused of. Nancy presents her very own in-your-face Oriental cookery show every Thursday evening and she’s quickly becoming Channel 5’s first big star. With her brightly coloured hair, wacky glasses and toothy grin, she looks a little like Janet Street-Porter (if Janet Street-Porter were to lose a couple of feet in height and then contract some sort of serious thyroid complaint, obviously) and she has one of the most manic laughs you’ll ever hear (“ha-haa-ha-ha-haaaaaa!”). Each week she conjures up culinary magic in her wok, occasionally breaking off to chivvy her amiable Ghanaian husband, Ben, for the ingredients. “Quick Ben! Courgette!” It’s great entertainment.

When we meet for lunch in a restaurant in Soho’s Chinatown, Nancy’s hair is dyed in Channel 5 rainbow colours, something she did for the station’s launch, and she’s wearing a pair of her trademark specs.

So how many pairs of glasses does she have?

“Why don’t you ask me how many pairs of knickers I have?” Nancy responds, ever the one to be outrageous should the opportunity should arise. I have to confess this wasn’t on my list of questions, but at times like this it’s often best to go with the flow.

So how many pairs of knickers does she have?

“Not many pairs. I can’t bloody afford them! Ha-haa!”

This theme of poverty is one she returns to often. Nancy grew up in Singapore, where her father ran a small prawn cracker factory, and in 1970, when she was in her twenties, she set off for London. She spoke very little English, but this didn’t stop her training as a nurse. And it was while working as a nurse in East Molesey in Surrey that she met Ben. It was love at first sight, apparently, and they were married on Valentine’s Day, 1976.

So why move into cookery?

“Nursing was so badly paid.” She says. “And I love cooking.”

She started with home catering, then sub-leased a café in Putney and ran a restaurant there in the evening. Finally, in 1986, the pair opened their very own restaurant, Enak Enak, in Lavender Hill, south London.

You can see the restaurant each week in Nancy’s show. I haven’t been there, but it seems to be frequented by the sort of young people who present programmes on Channel 5. Nancy is famous for being rude to her customers, but she admits it’s a performance, all part of the business. I get the feeling she’s quite a shrewd cookie, despite the pleas of poverty. “I’m very serious when it comes to business,” she says. And she comes from a family of traders after all.

Nancy admits it’s sometimes hard to be the person everyone expects her to be, but she wouldn’t have it any other way. And she’s very happy to be here. As the meal comes to an end, she gets all sentimental as she lists the pleasures of her life in England. “I have a house, I have gardening, I have lots of friends, I have fish, and the fish when they see me, their mouths open…”

It’s time to go.

“That’s it?” says Nancy. “You happy with that/ Good, you can piss off now. Ha-haaa-ha-ha-haaaaaaaaaaaaa!”

What you mustn’t go for – what you do not get – at Nancy Lam’s restaurant, Enak Enak, is a nice, quiet Indonesian curry. You don’t get shown to your table. You do not get your placement unobtrusively finessed by perfectionist waiters. You are not thanked and asked to come again by the maitre d’. Nancy tells you to park your ass over there. She throws the plates down as if they are gauntlets. And although the rest of the waitressing is by her daughter, and servile enough, at the end for the meal, Nancy emerges for the umpteenth time from the kitchen to give you the finger. The compensation is Nancy’s cooking, which, as half a million viewers of her Channel 5 show will have guessed, is good and refined and, therefore, not like her at all.

All those who, when they enter her eight-table front room in Lavender Hill, south London, do not also enter the spirit of Enak Enak are doomed. An intense young couple at a window table on my left make the huge mistake of being more interested in each other than the food and get complimentary cold shoulder of Nancy. Bill paid, they are told to piss off. But I am in trouble, too, because the non-appearance of my date is becoming obvious. Nancy wanders outside to have a look for her. “Me tits is fwozen,” says Nancy, who speaks Cockney but retains her oriental way with her rs, or, as she would say, her arse. As the minutes yawn and I cannot bear to pretend to read the menu any more, I know there will no room in this room for my private anguish.

Soon the whole restaurant is apprised of my humiliation, although, to Nancy’s credit, once she has spread the word, she is nice about it and does not make a show trial of me. She actually offers to dine with me, provided I pay. The big-eating party of diners to my right assures me that this is the one restaurant in town where you can eat alone, by which they mean it is the one restaurant in town in which you will never eat alone. To prove it, a blonde woman on the table to my left offers me a forkful of her chicken with tamarind, which she correctly describes as delicious. Nancy cooks me a consolatory starter of BBQ prawns, which she marinates, cooks over charcoal and serves with lemon juice. These are succulent little objects, crisp on the outside, fluffy inside, and it is rude of me to note that, at £7.25, they are more expensive than most of the main courses.

“Wa? You fink dey are pwarns like a pwarn cocktail?”

So these are fresh, not frozen?

“Fwozen fwesh,” she says, and there’s an end on it.

Nancy Lam, the madwoman who looms, cleaver in hand, from urban billboards advertising the number 5, came out of Singapore 27 years ago and comes shrieking out of your television set on Thursday nights, shouting instructions on how to work lemon grass and cashews. But neither the cultural confusion of the Far East nor television’s compulsive generation of personalities quite explain Nancy’s provenance. My guess is that she was dreamt up by a D.C Thompson cartoonist who watched horrified as his creation, Nancy Lam, The Cook from Hell, upped, satay skewers and escaped from his strip cartoon into the real world, shouting “Enak Enak!”

Dressed rotundly in a batik print, goggled by a pair of spectacular spectacles and with a fright of spikey hair dyed all the colours of oil slicked in a puddle, she looks more like a cartoon than a person. But I may just be picking up on the heavy hints dropped by her apron, which bears the violent imprint of the Dundee comics stable, and by the Noddy green restaurant itself, which has Dennis the Menace effigies hanging around its walls like felons from scaffolds and papier Mache balloons made of Beano covers.

It is into this bizarre grotto that my guest innocently calculations, 15 by hers. The restaurant applauds her ironically, and Nancy gives her a dressing down before granting her absolution on the grounds of her youth and beauty as do I). The blonde tamarind-sharer looks put out. “Habba gwass of wine, love,” orders Nancy of my guest, who was hoping for a nice, quiet Indonesian curry.

There follows a quiet period of catching up and house-white drinking, while Nancy cooks us a mix of satay, prawns and pieces of spareribs, a starter that is just fine, although I find myself falling into Enak Enak’s prevailing orthodoxy of wild praise for its owner, as if Nancy is some dragon who may be appeased only by a series of sacrificial compliments. The main course is a real triumph, a completely succulent dish called rendang pieces of rump steak “cooked with exotic spices and finished with coconut cream”. Nancy asks if anything disappointed us and we say no, although (actually) the chicken with cashews nuts did seem a little on the bland side of delicate.

By now it is dark, the young lovers have gone and Nancy is full throttle of sexual innuendo and abuse, not all of it coherent; “She played with herself and it popped up” she paraphrases one diner who has mentioned, for some reason, the immaculate conception. “Doon wowwy about her,” she says, referring to the stranger who had offered me comfort and has now departed, “shewalesbian.” On my way downstairs to the loo, I rub against an apron augmented with a giant pair of plastic mammaries. The translation from Singapore to the modern mainstream West has loosed in Nancy a libido that would scare Naomi Wolf.

There follows a post-prandial joke interlude in which her Ghanaian-born husband, Ben prompts her furiously from the wings. Ask for the story about he passenger on Singapore Airlines with a sore tooth. A tine of Quality Street is handed round. I realise I have never met a woman more like a school boy.

With a pancake roll filled with coconut and brown sugar and a home made sorbet, dinner including wine, comes to £58.35, which seems excellent value, although Nancy tells me to tell you: no 50 bucks, no bother come. She started catering 12 years ago, and Enak Enak nearly went “up shit creek” in a series of recessions. Channel 5 may be making her famous but, she promises, it is not about to make her rich. With sufficient psychological preparation, you’ll really enjoy Enak Enak, a theme restaurant whose theme is Nancy.

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

By Marco Pierre White

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

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.

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.

“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.

When was your last holiday?
I just got back from spending 16 days in Geneva. We went to rest – not to deposit money. I did try to deposit all my coppers but the Swiss told me they were too brown so I had to bring them back. You do not need to rest in life. Living in the city is too hectic and fast.

Are you still rude to customers?
Yes – we just have a good laugh really and they love it. It’s my home and I can do what I want but not in front of children. If there are children there, we don’t do such things – the same if people have straight faces. We know the ones we can have a laugh with and we just have a nice time.

Why does my Chinese never taste like the takeaway variety?
You have to make sure that everything is the right size. Cut the meat quite thinly – don’t buy the stuff that’s already in chunks. The vegetables shouldn’t be cut into big chunks that you can’t fit into your mouth because they don’t stir well. You know how a cauliflower has florets? Cut the big florets into four and leave the small ones – that’s a fantastic guideline for how big all the veg should be.

It’s the sauce I have trouble with…
Always use wine and oyster sauce or fish sauce. If you are a vegetarian use soya sauce – it’s heaven

What are your ten condiments for stir-fry?
Its a bit too early for me to remember them all but make sure your wok is hot and your fire high and mighty. Cut the vegetables as I have said. Always cut the meat against the grain, keep the sauce by your side and the wine not in your throat but in the dish….Is that enough? It must be.

So, is it all stir-fry at home?
No, I cook the odd roast – or at least Ben does. I also do stews and spaghetti. But I spice my bolognese without tomato and it ends up being oriental-style. Spaghetti is a noodle after all – it just has a different name.

What’s your motto?
Be truthful to yourself when you are in the kitchen. Once you enjoy cooking, you will love the taste of it. It should make your mouth water and make you feel sexy.

Is sex in the kitchen important?
Yes, of course. If two people are in the kitchen together, it’s always important to kiss and cuddle. When I’m in our little kitchen with Ben we are always bum to bum – it may be annoying sometimes if someone treads on your foot but if you love them you get over it.

Then what about Marco Pierre White saying a woman has to become a man in the kitchen to compete?
In the olden days – when people cooked for the emperors in the Orient – there were no women in the kitchens. It was always men who cooked as they were the only ones who could carry the heavy woks and pans – the women had to be breeders. These days, you can just get a man to carry the pans for you.

How do you stop spectacles steaming up in the kitchen? 
You can’t – there’s no way to do it other than to try to face the pans across you and keep your distance. They only steam up when you get too close.

Who is the best TV chef?
There are so many of them it’s not fair to tell you one name rather than another. If I really like one of them – it has to be Keith Floyd. I know I don’t drink and he does but we both have a laugh and try to be inspirational.

Did you have a strict upbringing?
Very much so. My father would never let us lie in and sleep. He would always get us up early and tell us what to do. My grandmother was just as bad – she believed women should learn. If we did something wrong, she would make us peel the onions and you know how hot they can be.

Why did you leave nursing?
We had three children and simply couldn’t afford to live on those wages.

Away from the wok, how do you relax?
I paint – I do a lot of watercolours but I can’t paint if I’m sad, I have to get rid of the sadness first. If I had no business, I’d spend half the time painting and the other in my garden. I have a roof garden where I do a lot of thinking and praying. I’m not a religious woman, though – my church and my own temple is my body.

£25 per head

£30 per head

Excluding drinks and service.

but all in all, I feel that I’ve done Wandsworth, so if I do stray back to those far-off, southern pastures it is really for one reason only: to visit Nancy Lam’s wonderful Indonesian and Far Eastern restaurant, Enak Enak.

It’s one of those places that you visit so you can eat an individual’s food and be looked after by them. Now, you might think that’s stating the obvious, but too many restaurants these days attempt to cook food they think they should serve in an atmosphere they only imagine to be right.

Nancy herself is a great cook but her restaurant is a family affair – Ben, her Ghanaian-born husband, cooks too and her children serve. I love family-run places. Before you ask, however, I have never considered opening a place run by my own family. Everyone is too emotional. If we opened on a Monday, by the weekend we wouldn’t have any customers left.

There is an honesty, meanwhile, about Enak Enak and I love how Nancy, middle right, shouts – in a nice way – at her customers. She opened it 21 years ago and today she’s like the eccentric restauranteur Peter Langan – she has his warmth and that same ability to make people feel special.

And the food matches her knowledge and skills. How many times has a chef shared his or her impressive-sounding philosophy with you, only to deliver food that is a huge disappointment?

On my most recent trip to Nancy’s, I took my wife, Mati, and we ordered lots of dishes that we shared. I love the concept of sharing, mainly because I love nicking tasty food off other people’s plates, and this legitimises it.

First out was some perfectly marinated chicken satay, middle left, cooked on charcoal – the way that they prepare street food in Indonesia. It came with peanut sauce, which they declare on the menu is ‘made from scratch’. The chicken was wonderfully juicy, thanks to its marinade, and they’re right to be proud of that nutty sauce. We had a couple of seafood dishes: ‘sexy salmon’ cooked in lemongrass and coconut sauce (a saucy little number indeed), and some deep-fried squid with spring onions and chilli, top right, which was properly fresh and tender. We also had pad Thai – rice noodles with prawns, chicken bean sprouts, peanuts and God knows what else. It worked like a dream.

Pudding could have been pancakes stuffed wit coconut, bottom middle, but I chose nothing. I simply wanted to remember the time, one summer, that Nancy asked me to lunch at her house. She served us homemade peach ice cream, from her own fruit. If she put that on the menu, she’d get a Michelin star. But I wouldn’t want that because too many people would end up crossing the north/south divide.

Mr Ishii says…
“You know I like this restaurant”, says MPW’s special assistant. “I get a good family feeling here. But I try to find the right word to describe the food. I search my brain and now I have it. This word is tasty. Because the food is tasty. Very tasty. I like my food to be tasty and this place serves tasty food.”

By Marco Pierre White

http://www.waitrose.com