It’s boring to bang on about how spicy Thai food can be – especially to readers who are Thai or otherwise far more accustomed to high-Scoville-scale dining. I have historically operated with an air of smugness about my heat tolerance, believing it afforded me a certain social cachet and gastronomic BDE. Alas, I have been humbled.
101 Thai Kitchen is a bustling local hangout among the constellation of great Thai restaurants in the Hammersmith area. Its hot pink walls are uncannily similar to Silverlake ‘Cocaine Thai’ eatery Night + Market Song – though with fewer mullets and cowboy boots in the dining room. It’s a known post-service hangout for the Tatler-cum-River Café commis chef crowd, but this evening it’s host to seven uniformed security guards who tell me they’ve left Trent Alexander-Arnold in Cirque le Soir, prompting the inevitable question ‘who is watching Trent’?
Chef founder Sutti Se-Upara and his wife Nong opened 101 Thai Kitchen in 2004 after a moment of revelation at Paris institution Lao Siam. While sitting next to a nonplussed 20-something Frenchman eating raw beef laab and an Isaan papaya salad with salted rice paddy crabs, Sutti figured that if a Parisian could enjoy authentic Isaan food then surely Londoners could too.
The food is very, very hot. It would be criminally disingenuous to omit this fact and its repercussions – tantamount to reviewing Murano and failing to mention that Angela Hartnett slapped you during your meal then came to your house the next morning to kick you in the shin.
The menu’s highlights are the Isaan and Southern Thai specialities that reflect Sutti and Nong’s respective heritage. The only concession to authenticity is to offer dialled-down heat for farangs like me – an offer I truculently refused. Tum Pu Plara, the aforementioned Isaan style Som Tum, comes bathed in a brooding, funky dressing; the Laab, a fiery salad of minced pork or chicken humming with sawtooth coriander, Thai basil, and mint. The Pla Plaa Style Lao is one of Sutti’s own creations – a whole fried seabass in a zesty vinegar dressing that had us gasping for air.
Among the Southern delicacies, visitors would be well advised to sample the Kua Gling – a dry, dense curry of mince, galangal and turmeric that takes no prisoners with handfuls of dried chillies pounded into a homemade curry paste. Gaeng Tai Plaa – a sour and salty mackerel curry – derives its punch from a paste of fermented fish entrails made by Nong’s aunt, the venerable ‘Auntie B’. It was a revelation to an ignorant like me and the ritual of working through it was akin to an ayahuasca ceremony; disturbingly hot and uncomfortable, yet impossible to resist another spoonful as each wave passed.
All of the dishes above are best enjoyed alongside an irresistibly named ‘Tower of Chang’, which might as well refer to Shoreditch House but is really a chilled bazooka of Thailand’s most popular beer.
The food only seems to get hotter as time goes on. Our conversation is stilted by hiccups and reduced to a breathy, staccato whisper. The gleaming cylinder of icy Chang is no respite for my singing tongue. It’s fantastic.
Life-giving shaved ices topped with jellies and fruit syrups brought us back to earth, a cooling balm for our beleaguered mouths. Refreshed and regrouped we immediately understood that 101 Thai Kitchen stands toe-to-toe with the finest Thai restaurants in the city. One can’t help but feel it could even inspire Singburi-levels of adulation and hype – if only it was located a little further east, in the ‘right’ part of town.
Can we add in something here about it being a popular post-service spot for The River Café crew? ‘Fewer mullets and cowboy boots and more Abercrombie-esque young commis chefs, clocked-off from a shift at The River Café just down the road’ kinda thing?
