It is not often that I find myself contriving multiple reasons why I shouldn’t review a restaurant. But that was the case with Kokum, a new, contemporary Indian in East Dulwich with an unexpectedly illustrious pedigree and a growing cult of fervent, spice-drunk devotees across message boards and primary school WhatsApp groups.
Partly, my reticence stemmed from the fact that it hadn’t been long since I visited a neighbourhood success story nearby (Evi’s). Partly it was an uncanny conceptual similarity to another south London rave of mine (Kachori). But mostly, it was the nagging question of just how notable yet another Punjabi-inflected curry house could really be.
Do I even need to say how wrong I was? Because, yes, while there’s a degree of familiarity to Kokum’s parade of spatter-painted chaats, smouldering meats and tandoor-bubbled breads, the execution —spearheaded by executive chef Manmeet Singh Bali and Sanjay Gour, formerly of Gymkhana — boasts an acute specialness that cannot be ignored. I walked into Kokum not convinced I would write it up. I left certain its brilliance had to be proclaimed to every postcode.
Though let it be known that there’s one particular hazard to negotiate. My wife and I took the kids along for Sunday lunch — both of them wailing as if they were being hauled off to borstal rather than just somewhere without pizza — and the first two things we all noticed were the mausoleum emptiness of the vast space, and the playlist.
Oh man, the playlist. I don’t know if you’ve had cause to imagine the sonic progeny of a dentist’s hold muzak and the twanging, vaguely eastern chillwave piped into a spa, but it is basically that, a form of low-level agony you imagine might have been the basis of some interrogation technique at Abu Ghraib.
I hope they change it. Until then, the food helps tune it out. Quinoa tikki chaat brought a pebble-dashed grain and burnt butternut squash patty, arrayed with impressionistic splats of chutney and ignited by the presence of a ravishing dribble of masala chickpeas. Samosas rigged with goat’s cheese and cashew nuts were a little dense but adroitly spiced.
Tandoor-blackened commas of tiger prawn came thickly daubed in a hot-sour wonder of a kasundi marinade. Raan utthapam, meanwhile — a mound of transcendent kid lamb on a thin plinth of Tamil Nadu-inspired rice pancake — was the moment I began to reflexively mutter disbelieving expletives.
“What I love,” said my wife, “is that it feels like a new version of quite a traditional Indian restaurant”
Signifying a melding of Indian food cultures, it’s an example of the way that Kokum (named for the fruit) roams the subcontinent with a sort of judicious adventurousness. On one hand there is serviceable butter chicken, fragrant pulao rice and garlic naan so ghee-slicked it practically glitters. On the other is a cardamom-laced Negroni, a tremendously rich and moody Lucknowi-origin short rib nihari, and a deeply enjoyable riff on bebinca, the squidgy, ghee-and-coconut-milk-infused cake.
“What I love,” said my wife, digging a spoon into a compelling basil crème brûlée, “is that it feels like a new version of quite a traditional Indian restaurant.” This is the nub of it. At a time when there is much fretting about closures among Britain’s beloved, predominantly Bengali-run curry houses (a Kormageddon, as one headline had it), this opening shows both a path forward and just what those faded, Seventies-era businesses are up against.
Soon, we may all have a local spot with a former-Gymkhana chef as a co-founder. Until then, it will have to be a pilgrimage to Kokum, a plate ringing with spice, and the sense, frankly, that progress has never felt quite so thrillingly delicious.
