Friday Night Dinner: East Street by Tampopo

The idea behind going for a different restaurant every Friday is to try out a wide variety of places, but also of cuisines. We are lucky that in London, we have access to pretty much any sort of dishes we fancy.

Sometimes, you can even find a wide variety of different culture’s food in one place, and East Street is such an establishment. It is situated just North of Oxford Street, close to Tottenham Court Road station. It specialised in what can only be described as pan-Asian.

Their menu is extensive, from Szechuan dishes via Japan and Korea to Indonesian and Malay. We started with two of their small plates, the Malaysian Satay Chicken and Korean Popcorn Chicken. They were both delicious, very flavourful and moorish. Good Satay Chicken I remember from my parent’s Indonesian friends, and this was just like it. With our starters, we enjoyed a lovely Hokkaido Negroni as we didn’t think a bottle of wine would fit with this menu.

Choosing the small plates was hard, as there are so many nice sounding ones. Instead of ordering them all, we also picked a large plate each. I ordered a Rendang Beef Curry, again, with memories of the Indonesian Restaurants you find in the Netherlands. It was accompanied by rice, peanuts, boiled eggs, and some pickled cucumber. My companion ordered a Tamarind Chicken, slices of well cooked moist chicken in a delicious sticky tamarind sauce. It came served with rice, broccoli and crispy onions, this was one of the non-spicy options on the menu, but despite the lack of chillies still had a bit of a kick. Again, not wanting wine, we picked a bog-standard Tiger beer to wash all the delicious flavours down, which paired pretty well.

Although we were pretty full, we could not quite resist the churros, and shared three with a tasty caramel sauce. I don’t quite understand how they fit in an Asian kitchen, but they were delightful regardless.

If we were to return, which seems likely, we would probably have a meal made up of more of the smaller dishes (all of which sounded delicious) instead of going for the traditional starter plus main course approach.

The place was pretty full, and when we left I remarked that we were probably amongst the oldest of the clientele, but we didn’t feel out of place. Which I think is a good sign.