A lot of people recommend me a lot of restaurants for a lot of reasons, but when three separate people recommend me the same restaurant across a single night, I take notice.
I’d had Mambow on my hit list for a while, but that triple whammy bumped it up to the top, so I jumped at the chance when a friend suggested a group trip to try the Clapton Malaysian spot out.
Unfortunately, tables are in high demand and our dates were limited, which left us staring down the barrel of a 9:15pm dinner, which we each rode out in our own way. Some snacked, some shrugged, some starved and fell into a deep, all-consuming hanger. Don’t eat late unless you know what you’re doing, folks, it’s not for the faint of heart.
Mambow’s dining room appears compact, but stretches back I’m-not-sure-how-far into the dark and out of view, though the menu is more decisively concise: six starters, two salads, four mains, and rice, with a choice of two desserts to follow. That menu shifts and changes frequently though, so there should be plenty of variety for return visits.
Our (ravenous) party of five was encouraged to just order one of everything, though that’s overkill — we dropped one salad and one starter and ordered the rest, but could have happily ditched another dish or two and still been well fed. This is worth bearing in mind if the pricing feels daunting: you might be happy ordering a little less than you’d think.
Mambow’s website describes itself — I’m sorry, describes the “current vibe” — as “Malaysian Heat + Juicy Wines”. The heat I can attest to, though I’m less sure about the vino. One bottle hardly feels like a fair assessment, but the chilled Spanish red we ordered — picked out as a recommendation — was thin and flighty, lacking the substance you’d want to hold up to the fire of the food. For £30 I might not have minded; for £52 I felt a little aggrieved.
Still, even if you skip the wine there’s little to regret from the food. The star of the starters is the umai: slivers of cured fish interspersed with hearty blobs of tamarind granita, bobbing in a pool of coconut milk and vibrant green chive oil. The look is somewhere between alluringly lurid and downright bizarre, but the subtly sweet and sour hit of tamarind is a perfect foil to the salty cure.
Nyonya-style chicken wings arrive closer in size to drumsticks, thick with crunchy batter and laden with heat. The wok-fried mussels are almost as substantial, and we slurp up every drop of their soybean and curry leaf sauce. Otak-otak prawn toast is the closest to a weak link here - sod’s law, the only starter we order two of - with too many flavours blending together and all getting a little lost along the way.
We weren’t sure what to expect from a dish that promised bavette steak jerky — a series of words that got a French dining companion first elated, then crestfallen, while our resident Texan went through a near inverse — but it arrived as the toughened highlight of a dill and tomato salad, dressed with sambal belacan for the requisite Malaysian element. I didn’t come to Mambow expecting a remarkably bright, punchy tomato salad, but boy did they deliver one.
If the kambing sioh lamb ribs are on the menu, then I’m afraid you’re doing yourself a grave disservice by doing anything other than ordering them. The £28 asking price may feel steep from the lofty vantage point of the beginning of your meal, but when half a lamb’s torso arrives you’ll probably feel differently.
Lamb ribs in London are hard to find outside of the city’s many Turkish and south Asian grills, where they come charred, crisp, and too often chewy. Here they are anything but, fatty slabs of meat quivering in their tamarind sauce, ready to slouch off the bone at the slightest invitation. Mambow’s menu is built for sharing, but this is the one dish where I’d consider making an exception.
A jackfruit curry is better than its inevitable write-off as “the vegan dish” deserves, offering far more of interest than black pepper curry chicken thighs, which might have impressed more had the lamb not decided to show them up.
Grilled squid stuffed with pork belly mince and drenched in a sauce made from its own ink felt destined to outshine even the ribs, but sadly ‘twas not to be. The sauce did its part, but the squid itself had spent too long on the grill, running uncomfortably close to the jerky in texture. It’s the risk you run ordering cephalopods, but a shame for kitchen firing out so many hits to suffer such a predictable miss.
I’m told the cendol — a coconut granita topped with red beans and pandan jelly — is a decent approximation of one of southeast Asia’s most popular desserts, but I had more time for the kuih bingka. This dense, fudgy cassava cake came topped with an almost savoury toasted rice ice cream, a remarkable facsimile of Britain’s best school dinner puddings, elevated further by serving it in a squat, porcine bowl. More of that, please.
I couldn’t say I had a perfect meal at Mambow. A couple of dishes fell flat, the wine didn’t do much for me. But every dish that did hit did so with the full force of a freight train, and I can see the perfect meal in here: a second order of the ribs, drop the prawn toast, maybe throw in that tempting grilled banana blossom salad we neglected along the way.
Just as importantly, this is generous cooking that needn’t break the bank unless you want it to, while steering well clear of the pressure for east Asian food to be cheap and cheerful. This is fantastic food that will still leave you full, and has already served as a “We could eat at Mambow twice over for that price…” benchmark in the week since. And you know what? I think I just might do that.