Work in progress: Chet’s at Rondo La Cave
(Picture: Matt Writtle)Nothing shifts London’s restaurant priorities like a sustained period of warm weather. The sun beats down, artfully framed shots of Calippos flood Instagram and, all at once, demand for perfectly appealing dining rooms is supplanted by a mad scramble for slivers of an exhaust-choked terrace, faintly verminous beer gardens and oversubscribed rooftops. It is a heatwave behaviour you can set your watch by.
And so, early last week — as the temperature nudged 25 degrees and the entire city seemed to be one inebriated, half-naked mass, spilling happily onto every patch of available pub pavement — I cannot say that I felt especially thrilled to be descending to Chet’s: a kitchen residency in the dark, windowless confines of Rondo La Cave wine bar in Holborn.
Now, the traditional dramatic turn here would be to reveal that the food and atmosphere at Chet’s — which is the pop-up brainchild of fêted LA chef Kris Yenbamroong and a trial balloon for a permanent restaurant — helped alleviate this apprehension. And it really did. Up to a point. But for all the explosive irreverence of Yenbamroong’s Thai-American flavours, I found that, over the course of two visits, occasional sloppiness made for a lasting impression that was more mixed. Which is to say that Chet’s felt at times like exactly what it is: an imperfect, tantalising glimpse of a more fully formed operation, wedged a little awkwardly in a blank canvas hotel bar and lacking the guiding hand of its (currently) absent figurehead.
Still, there is no denying that Yenbamroong — a second-generation restaurateur who has turned his Night + Market brand into a mini-empire — can slap a lip-tingled grin on your face.
Ensconced in the murkily lit, bottle-lined, Parisian cellar of a room, my first dinner began with decently executed fried chicken: a hefty, gushingly juicy piece of thigh meat, crowned by golden-fried wisps of batter and mostly notable for its volcanic little sidecar of bird’s eye chilli dip. “Now that is sort of physically painful,” said an old friend, dabbing his brow and gulping a glass of Alpine white (courtesy of organic producer Damien Bastian Goddard) from the low-intervention list. “But I really don’t want it to be taken away.”
The better dishes all tend to possess this knife-edge intensity. Chiang Rai hotdog brought the satisfying tensile pop of frankfurter, thickly heaped with a similarly ferocious pork chilli, while smashburger — primed with the fragrant, fiery tang of “Chet’s secret sauce” — was gloriously sloppy and impolite. Crispy rice salad had smoky heat, an invigorating blast of ginger and a voluble, multi-faceted crunch that could probably be heard at street level.
However, alongside these highs were flatter moments. Slices of milk bread toast, topped with garlicky bubbled cheese, had the warmth of prik tum (a variation on the chilli-flecked Thai dipping sauce) flowing through it, but also the hurried, store-bought simplicity of a snack made by a drunk person. Wedge salad, slopped in blue cheese dressing and gummy candied pork jowl pieces, was a bit of a cloying mess. What’s more, the spicy Thai beer nuts we’d had while we perused the menu re-emerged, crumbled over an (admittedly, pretty effective) Hackney Gelato ice cream and fish sauce caramel sundae. You can see it can’t you? By which I mean the lingering sense of a kitchen prone to repetition and not exactly pushing itself.
To judge Chet’s as a finished project is perhaps unfair. Rondo La Cave is, ultimately, a space for chefs to fine-tune their ideas ahead of a bigger roll-out within Ennismore’s global network of hotels (Yenbamroong’s fully fledged operation will launch at The Hoxton in Shepherd’s Bush this autumn). Even so, given it is in situ until September, there is a real opportunity to make this place feel like less of a franchised stopgap; to raise some other dishes up to the thrilling level of the menu’s audacious stand-outs. And, truthfully, to just go for it a touch more. Because as summer swelters on, Londoners may need a little bit more motivation to take things inside.
