Barang, London: ‘I now trust this restaurant with my life’

Photograph by Sophia Evans

Every time I eat a McMuffin, hungover in the front seat of a car, I think: “Does the space matter if the food is really good?” Anyway: Barang. I should warn you that Barang is a residency, and we should talk about that. It’s hard to decide where to land on residencies. In recent years they have crept over impossibly expensive London, above or in pubs or sometimes in revolving guest-chef restaurants, such as Naughty Pig or Carousel. Sometimes they become so popular they eat the face of the place they are in (I have heard of one recent residency where the pub has, for the first time, had to implement table-booking software, simply because so many people are turning up just for the food), some venues inexplicably becoming accidental restaurant incubators, hosting residency after residency that goes on to become something bricks and mortar and real. So many of the capital’s cool-list troubling restaurants began like this: Rita’s in Soho, and Papi, and Khao Bird and Wildflowers and the already-excited-for-it Tiella. I’ve eaten some of my better food of the last couple of years at some of them, and then turned up again a week later as if to a ghost town, and been told that the next time I want to have that spring chicken I have to follow an obscure Instagram account and hope for the best. The system is flawed.

Anyway, we’re above the Globe Tavern in Borough Market. My brief Borough Market review: no, not any more. Stop taking photos of strawberries! I navigate past everyone on earth and enter the Globe – a very decent geezer-y boozer, the kind of place where the sinks don’t really have hot water, but the beer is always served in the exact correct glass it’s supposed to come in – and do the most man-with-a-residency-booking thing possible which is: disturb a black-shirted barman who simply couldn’t care less, and go, “I’m so sorry but… I’m here for Barang?” He wordlessly points me round the corner where I have to walk past both bathrooms and duck under a low ceiling and go up some stairs marked only with a single laminated sheet of A4, and then I am there. That’s not how you get in a restaurant, is it.

I think, though, that I don’t care. The cocktails are by Rachel Reid, formerly of Bar Swift, and we start with the £12 aperitif of a mini kampot pepper martini. (I do love a mini martini, but they feel very current Labour government, to me. Like Keir Starmer woke up one day and decided, instead of doing anything useful, he’d make martinis legally small so I can’t get so drunk on them I send erratic texts. Let me live!) We add a koh kong mignonette oyster, because if you see a mini martini and an oyster on a menu you sort of have to have it. There is enough pepper in both to truly wake me up. Barang is billed as “contemporary Cambodian food”, meaning the chef Tom Geoffrey (formerly of Soho’s most perfect restaurant, Kiln) has spent the last eight years figuring out the Khmer herbs front to back and now wants to blow my brain out with that knowledge and, before we order, the waitress looks specifically at me and says: “Are you sure you’re OK with spice?”

Yes. In quick order we (I had a guest, but he was boring, so does not get a significant mention here) work through: the raw Cornish blue fin with compressed melon (I asked, they sent the chef out in the middle of a busy shift to tell me, so I offer this unto you: with a vacuum sealer) and the diver scallop with tamarind butter, daikon and crackling. Normally, I am against throwing too many things on a scallop – it’s already a scallop! – but I now trust Barang with my life. They could have put a dozen more things on there and I would have nodded and said thank you.

The venison laab was only meant to keep the table warm before the real big-hitter mains arrived, but I kept going back to it with my fork. Perfectly caramel-crispy-chewy, heavy breathing with herbs and red chilli, I couldn’t get a photo until I’d already sprinted through half of it. But when the mains did arrive, both quickly nudged the venison down the pecking order: a saruman curry which comes with a vegan option, but we had ladled over the tender smoked chicken, studded with charred peas and just-ripe figs; and then the half pheasant with Khmer hot honey, deep-fried so it was brown-crispy on the outside and perfectly pickable within. If I can be bothered to do a dishes of the year list on New Year’s Day, that will be around the top three. This is beer food, proper beer food, pepper-spice instead of chilli-spice, and we enjoyed with three ice-cold mugs of the stuff and stared out the window and told each other this room is where Bridget Jones lived in Bridget Jones.

I assume people with money read this paper – maybe? Or I suppose. No, the Telegraph is still going – so if that’s you, a plea: can you please do the only cool thing a rich person can do, and that’s patronise this establishment so they have a proper restaurant? If I have any notes it’s that they could have done with having the beer on tap instead of out of small cans, and have enough ownership of the place to put some things on the walls and make it feel like a restaurant rather than a dining room they are trying very hard not to leave any marks on in case they lose a deposit in the spring. They’re there until the end of March, and after that I don’t want to have to keep following them around Instagram, so could someone please sort? Some of London’s best restaurants started like this. Barang is up next.

Barang, The Globe Tavern, 8 Bedale Street, London SE1 9AL (baranglondon.com). Dishes from £7.50-£68. Kampot martini with Carlingford oyster £12