Kaieteur Kitchen, SE17
Guyanese home cooking, by way of London
I was worried I’d be late to to publishing this piece, but Gareth Southgate’s England have kindly decided to continue their dreadful, dull form, giving me the chance to multi-task. Fortunately, there’s nothing dreadful or dull about my subject, the last truly excellent meal I had in London, at Elephant and Castle's Kaieteur Kitchen.
The benefit of eating well in London is regularly being exposed to food you know almost nothing about, and so it was for me here. I couldn't tell you a whole lot about Guyana, where chef-owner Faye Gomes hails from, and most of what I can I only learnt on the night. It's from the Caribbean end of South America, boasts the largest single-drop waterfall in the world (from which Kaieteur takes its name), and its cuisine merges the Latin and the Caribbean and a whole lot else. Faye's cooking runs that gamut and then some, by her own admission covering Guyanese classics alongside dishes that are her own family staples or were simply made up along the way.
If there's a unifying element, it's intensity. This is not subtle cooking; it's rich, crispy, fatty, spicy, pungent, and everything else in-between. A scotch bonnet hot sauce delivered to the table without comment is the sort that you dab gently or risk gasping out a cartoonish head of steam, a homemade ginger beer is almost as hot.
The crowning joy of this philosophy is undoubtedly the pepper pot: an unutterably dark, rich stew that draws depth not only from the scraggly, gelatinous bits of cow foot dotted about but also an unholy array of spices including chilli, cinnamon, cloves, orange, and thyme. It tastes a little like Christmas and a lot like nothing I've ever had before, the most intensely alien dish I've eaten in some time. I return for seconds, thirds, and a heaping portion of leftovers to take home, eager for every maximalist ounce of flavour.
Other dishes are more familiar, but no worse for it. Pork belly comes in generous, jiggly chunks, coated with cumin and stewed in Guinness, the fat ready to give way at the slightest touch, with more than a passing resemblance to Chinese takes on the pig's wobbliest cut. Fried chicken pieces are craggy and crisp on the outside, tender on the bone, the textural contrast slider cranked all the way up, served with "fruity sauce" to cut through it all. Lengths of aubergine threaten to melt into a coconut curry, the flesh merging inseparably with the sauce, the coconut sweetness constant but never cloying.
Intensity doesn't have to mean complexity, of course, nor does it force us to take sides in the great Anglo-American Twitter feud over the importance of "seasoning". Asked about the ingredients of what I suspect may have been the best bowl of okra of my life, Faye looked almost confused when she replied: "Okra." Chopped finely, fried off in a little oil, and cooked down to lose the liquid, this might as well be a dishful of okra concentrate. It has been seasoned, of course, but in such a way that it simply seems to have brought more of the vegetable out of itself, a touch of chilli and tomato that hang back carefully, backing dancers that know better than to upstage the star.
I visited Kaieteur Kitchen in a large-ish group, dominating the compact dining room and able to share our way round a pretty full spread of Faye's rotating offerings. This feels like the best way to make the most of the menu, assuming Faye can fit you in, to save you from the agony of indecision. Takeout is available too, though crucially not delivery. A Deliveroo sticker is half torn from the door, the explanation simple enough: Faye worried that late, cold food would "ruin her reputation." If you want to eat Kaieteur, you've got to eat it right.
More than anything, that means eating it with Faye. London's inherent drive for sprawl and scale makes it all too rare to find good food so indelibly connected to the hands that made it. Whether describing dishes, explaining Kaieteur's name, or simply cackling at a mispronunciation of a dish, Faye was present in every order over the night, making her mark on each and every customer. Never mind intensity, Faye herself is what ties her cooking together.