Joined-up Thai food for adults

This review was first published in August 2001

If you like your pudding to taste of hot dog, then you will love Nahm. This is an odd thing to say, but it's the only way I know of conveying the out-and-out weirdness of the flavours that will dance across your palate should you eat there. The place is a white-knuckle ride for the tastebuds.

Britain has a curious relationship with Oriental food. The dishes of the Indian subcontinent have either been traduced into such abominations as the Chicken McTikka, or into a post-pub trial of machismo, rather like some medieval trial by ordeal, to see who can consume the hottest, most spiced dish.

Thai food has gone the same way. Either one has the full-on The King and I theming of such fabulously kitsch - sorry, theatrical - eateries as the Blue Elephant or the colour-coded curries that have become more of an in-pub staple than the ploughman's lunch.

Not any more. At Nahm, we have gastronomically correct Thai food. Nahm is spawned of Darley Street Thai, Darley Street, Sydney. If you have been to Australia in the past ten years, you will almost certainly have heard of this place and its chef-patron David Thompson. He is viewed as something of a deity in the southern hemisphere, and was even asked to set up a gastronomic academy in Thailand to help save the culinary heritage of this part of the world. Thompson is a gastronomic historian like no other. With little or no prompting, he will plonk himself down at your table, whip out a couple of ancient-looking, suitably dog-eared cookbooks written in Thai, and give an impassioned reading of some particularly resonant passage about ground salmon, minced prawns or coconut, or rabbit and mushroom soup. His own biopic is sure to be called something along the lines of Raiders of the Lost Coconut Press - an appliance he recently had installed in the kitchens.

Happily for London, Thompson was lured away from a life of gastronomic academia by Christina Ong, who presumably offered him a shedload of cash to come and open a Thai restaurant in her Halkin Hotel. This used to be the venue of a swanky Italian joint called Stefano Cavallini at The Halkin. I have to say I rather liked it. It was supposed to revolutionise the way we ate Italian food; Cavallini is now running an eponymous delicatessen in South London.

With Thompson, Mrs Ong has got something that blasts Oriental cooking into an entirely new dimension. Moreover, it is also virtually impossible to get a table in the place since gastronomes have been rifling through their thesauri to find alternative ways of expressing such sentiments as exquisite, haunting, beautiful, epoch-making and so on.

However, much as I liked the man and admired his enthusiasm, I do have a few cavils with his food. I am perhaps a tad conservative, but is it entirely necessary to sprinkle a pudding with deep-fried shallots? Then there are the crisp fish cakes which look a little like growths of coral and taste vaguely piscine but have very little to do with the fishcakes I like to eat at Le Caprice.

On the plus side, the salad of crisp salted trout with grilled corn peppers is a triumph; the jungle curry of monkfish with the inevitable deep-fried shallots and long-leaf coriander is tasty; and Thompson's way with scallops, which he gets from Scotland, is exotic and exquisite. The black sticky rice is a fantastic pudding, although the coconut cream was too gelatinous for my liking.

My advice, though, would be to give the nahm arharn (a traditional Thai meal? as if you didn't know) a miss. Although this may be good value at £47, my inclination would be to choose the simpler dishes and leave the more exotic confections to the foodies. I would also be interested to try David Thompson's business lunches. Quite how many Belgravia businessmen will be wooed by the by-now-fabled deep-fried shallots is uncertain. But having tasted Thompson's exotic evening menu, I would welcome the opportunity to try a toned-down, less fussy, less pricey and, dare I say it, less serious version.