Southern Thai food in South London? Nick finds a backstreet beauty

‘This must be the restaurant,’ said P observing a flotilla of food delivery scooters queuing up at the front door of a small place.

Heading down an otherwise residential street in Brockley, I’d had my doubts we had the right address. It didn’t look like the kind of road to find aThai restaurant, but men on scooters can’t be wrong. And if it was selling that many takeaways then it surely had to be serving good food? We would find out.

It has good provenance. TAI was set up in 2019 by Richard Poole who is the co-founder of Slurp Thai and Dang’s—a Thai restaurant and cocktail bar based in Shoreditch. Richard’s family also started the well-known restaurant chain Rosa’s Thai.

No expense has been spared on setting up TAI. In fact hardly any money has been spent at all, it’s all about as basic as you can get without asking customers to bring their own tables and chairs.
This is not a complaint. This simple vibe of crudely whitewashed bare brick, upcycled oddments of furniture, plus a slightly overworked single waitress, is reminiscent of many cafes in Thailand. The focus here is firmly on Southern Thai food.

A table at the back is groaning under the weight of deliveries waiting to be picked up and is constantly replenished. Good to see all the bags are paper, Richard’s idea was to create a Thai restaurant that puts sustainability front and centre, along with reducing waste, so TAI doesn’t serve beef and all of its packaging is fully recyclable.

This suits Brockley’s rather bohemian vibe and I could hear quite a few ‘posh’ accents in the room, as well as spot some public schoolboys (the thick hair is always a giveaway) with parents. TAI is actually only 17 minutes from London Bridge or 7 mins from Canada Water by tube, so I imagine it’s a hot postcode for City types, too..

The menu is short, which is a blessing, and it all sounds rather good. We dither a bit,  then order what we assume to be nibbles, starters and mains. This was the only mistake of the night as it all arrived at once, which was rather disconcerting and made for a bit of a rush to stop some dishes cooling down too much.

However we did still try to eat in the order we’d intended, so we tucked into prawn crackers with somjits thai chilli oil first. Nice brown crackers, not the saliva-sucking white ones that one sees in the average Chinese. A good ‘prawny’ flavour, too and the chili oil was fierce.

We’d ordered gai tod had yai. Basically TFC – fried chicken that’s first marinated in fish sauce, turmeric, black pepper and then deep-fried and served with millennial mayonnaise,  aka sriracha.

We’d asked for breast, but you can also have wings. What is it with chicken wings bwuv? The whole of London seems to be taken over with chain shops selling fried wings, they appear to be the only food people under twenty five will eat.

Anyway these were lovely; plump and moist and moreish. We alternated these with bites of ai cala tai herb – calamari served with a side of sweet chilli dip.These were good too, although the squid pieces had fused into mostly one piece, which made sharing a bit of a struggle. The squid was tender and clearly had all been prepped in the restaurant, no suspicious perfect circles.

Crab fried rice is apparently very popular in Thai beach resorts, so we pretended we were in Brockley By Sea and had a plateful. I have to say that I couldn’t see much evidence of crab in it, although the flavour was good and there was certainly no shortage of egg.

Chili oil livened it all up and simple thick slices of cucumber made for a contrasting crunch. Lime to squeeze over was a good idea, but it was a very small piece of lime and I only got a few drops out of it.

You can have your pad ga prao with chicken, tofu or prawns, but lashings of Thai basil is what makes the dish what it is. Thai Basil is very different from Italian Basil of course, I grow it every year in the greenhouse and it has a kind of chewing gum smell raw and a licorice-like taste. It’s lovely and I can never grow enough.

We had prawns with green beans, lots of chilli and a mix of fish and oyster sauce. I thought ours had the balance of oyster sauce to fish sauce slightly wrong, too much oyster sauce threatened to tip the dish into Chinese territory, what with the addition of onions and green and red peppers. Very tasty all the same. We basically cleared every plate on the table.

TAI doesn’t have a wine list, that would be a bit too classy I suspect, but we had a decent helping of Pinot Grigio served in the kind of tumbler you used to get if you collected tokens in petrol stations. All part of the calculated low rez ascetic at TAI perhaps, or maybe just cost saving, anyway it was fine. Who needs Riedel?

We were pretty full and pretty happy and while there was no dessert menu we were offered slices of mango with sticky rice or a deep fried banana fritter. The latter I have always avoided since getting third degree burns off one many years ago, but I like mango and I like sticky rice and so we shared a dish. The mango could have been a bit riper, but it was still enjoyable and I do love sweet, sticky, glutinous rice.

The small place was full by now and the takeaways were still flying out the door and I could now see why. Tasty Thai food at knock down prices is a winner in anyone’s book and if I was local I’d be summoning those scooters at least once a week.

tai.co.uk

Tai Brockley

106 Foxberry Rd

London SE4 2SH, UK