Labour of love: Kilig
(Picture: Adrian Lourie)Kinilaw is a dish most efficiently described as Filipino ceviche; fat chunks of fish, cured to pale, plump softness, and tumbled in a brine that’s more about vinegared, puckering sourness than pronounced heat. It is, in my experience, a gateway to this archipelagic nation’s massively underrated cuisine. But late on during lunch at Kilig in Deptford, as we finished the last of our mains, we realised the version we had ordered at the start of the meal was very much missing in action.
“Oh yes, yes, sorry,” said one flustered member of the swamped, three-person staff, when we gently asked where it was. “We’ll do that right away.” That we told him not to bother (never usually a good sign) felt more like a necessary act of kindness than any sort of value judgement on most of what we’d just eaten. Even so, it is a moment that still strikes me as more than a little instructive in relation to this new Colombian-Filipino fusion spot. Kilig is occasionally inspired and enormously likeable but also prone, here and there, to a kind of erratic overreach. That it gets its name from the Tagalog word for a giddying surge of romantic excitement seems apt. Many of its pleasures really did burn with the fleeting intensity of a crush.
