Lower Clapton is to get another feather in its restaurant cap as Malaysian restaurant Mambow gets its first permanent home there, opening in October.
After starting life on Commercial Street in February 2020 before becoming a range of popular at-home meal kits, Mambow later expanded into a stall space in Peckham Market.
Now it moves east into a small space on Lower Clapton Road, with room for a total of 40 diners, including 20 seats in a partially-covered outdoor garden. The dining room will be built around a central open kitchen and a standing bar.
The food at Mambow is rooted in regional Malaysian specialities, with chef and founder Abby Lee telling the Standard: “I take inspiration from my Peranakan and Sarawakian heritage, cook with the incredible produce available to me in the UK, and draw on my experience in modern kitchens around Europe to present Malaysian cuisine through a new lens.”
The menu is yet to be fully announced but promises to highlight regional variations of the cuisine such as Nyonya, celebrating lesser-known dishes thanks to recipes passed down from Lee’s auntie. Current dishes on the Peckham menu include otak-otak (a red curry spiced fish cake) and lor bak (a spiced pork and prawn bean curd roll). “The concept is very much still the same,” Lee said of the upcoming venture.
Lee continued: “I’m really excited to be opening our first permanent site, it feels like the natural next step for Mambow and I can’t wait to be part of the community in Clapton.
“It’s been a lot of fun playing around with the menu in a bigger kitchen and coming up with new dishes — people have been so receptive to everything I’ve had on the menu so far, so it’ll be nice to be able to introduce even more Malaysian flavours to everyone who comes to visit.”
