The meal began with four snacks Lemon Verbena, coconut fermented nectarine; beef tartare Dacian (oscietra caviar) and Gogu jam which was had good spice; doenjang gougere with fermented soy bean paste chilli & paprika and a gamtae sandwich of classic Korean seeweed.  The latter was very delicate, very spongey but also quite bland.

The first course was heritage carrot with barbecued carrot, beurre blanc tomato glaze, pecan nuts and buckwheat in the side and this was a beautiful carrot dish.  Next up was a daikon tarte tatin.  This included toasted barley, roasted potato, burnt hay, puff pastry and roasted potato cream and was enjoyable as a dish.  

Nurungji (crispy fried rice) came with dourdough & dashima (seaweed) butter.  This was fine and was followed by Cod: hwangtae broth gat-kimchi (mustard leaf) dulse tapenade, potato leaf and dried pollack and taramasalata, which had good flavour.  Samhap was wagyu tteokgalbi, Orkney scallop, shiitake mushroom, Jerusalem artichoke padron pepper purée, sticky rice and brown rice with dashi and mushroom purée – this  was absolutely spell binding as a dish and superbly executed. 

Pear sorbet & pomegranate with pine formed a good pre-dessert and was followed by the main dessert of fig leaf compote (at bottom) and creme brulee.  This was a fig tart made with buckwheat, linden tree honey glaze on top and a fig bon bon held with Madeira which was absolutely superb.

Petit fours included daechu (juju bean) with Madeleine glaze & coffee and sesame cookie as well as coffee sesame cookie which were fine and went well with the wonderful array of tea on show.  Test tubes showing the different kinds of tea leaf available were shown to allow diners to smell each to inform their choice which I haven’t seen in a restaurant before and this was a superb touch.  The actual choices were: black tea with yuzu, green tea first flush and infusions of mugwort (herb), plum blossom with marzipan and persimmon leaf.

All in all, this was a very skilled menu and it was a delight to speak to the chef about his cooking ethos and journey to the restaurant gaining his star.  It is the only Korean Michelin starred restaurant in the UK and enthusiasts of this cuisine are well-advised to try.

Food Grade: 77%

Milk bread with brown butter and caviar salt was first and a very nice start.  Beef from rump formed the satay with peanut sauce and was customarily very good.  Mei Mei chicken came with avruga caviar and a miso mayo and tare dipping sauce made with mirin rice wine.  A lovely, sweet combination for the pleasant fried chicken and utterly satisfying.  

Essex heirloom tomatoes cam with burnt chive oil and a sensational Hainanese chicken vinegarette with Thai basil.  Next was a Laksa with a mackerel coconut base, lemongrass,  Laksa noodles, Vietnamese hot mint and fresh shiso.  This was a fabulous dish with delightfully cooked mackerel and sumptuous flavour combined.

Next up were crystal lemon cucumbers from Crocknam Farm in Cornwall served with a Timur pepper dressing showing fresh Thai style aromats, with nectarine.  Unfortunately, this is the one course that did not agree with me as was overly too pungent to enjoy its unique armoats and flavour.  Hainanese chicken was poached and came from free-range chicken, served with spring onion and ginger sauce chillun, served warm.  The real star here I think is the actual rice which has a sensational flavour from the Hainanese chicken, almost more so than the enjoyable chicken itself which sounds strange I know, but do please try this for yourself to try and get a sense of what I mean.  The dessert was rice pudding with roasted plum, coconut sorbet, pandan and coconut.  This was well done and hugely enoyable.

I enjoyed this meal hugely and it was great to be able to speak to the chef in the kitchen who was digging out and leading by example. The reasonable £25 corkage charge allowed us to enjoy our favoured wines through this good quality, Singaporean meal, which is a rare find in London, let alone the UK.

Food Grade: 71%

Firstly, Mei Mei is Elizabeth Haigh’s nod to her younger siblings to explain the name further.  The market stand has high-rise stools for the majority and one side area taking four comfortably to sit down at a table.  No ringing ahead to book, this is turn up and order only, just as per hawker dining in Singapore.  Once your buzzer goes, you can either take chosen dishes away or sit at an available stool and have overlooking the kitchen.

For the kaya toast, the bread comes from the superb Bread Ahead supplier, responsible for some of the finest doughnuts in the land and equally wonderful bread.  The texture of this toast is spot on and whilst most kaya I have had is more pure-pandan greener and not caramelised, this much more sweetened version is probably designed more for Western palates.  The kaya is prepared by cooking coconut cream to 83 degrees Celcius, with sugar, pandan and caramel added.  Butter slices are also added to give extra temptation to the toast.  The toast is £3.50 on its own or an insanely good value £5.50 if you get the set which means for the additional £2 you gain two slow-cooked eggs to dip the kaya toast in and a teh tarik, the latter being £3.50 on its own.

At the heart of Singaporean cuisine is the all-important chilli sauce and sambal (a chilli paste, usually with dried crustacean).  The chilli sauce here, made fresh consists of garlic, chilli, ginger, chicken fat & stock, lime and salt and is probably the best chilli sauce I can recollect.  I am actually not one for too much heat, but this chilli has a vibrant rather than aggressive freshness and is terrific.   The Nasi Lemak dish has this on the side served to coconut rice, fried egg, cucumber, peanuts anchovies and fried chicken which is a traditional dish eaten all day round in Singapore. Quality sambal.

The deep-fried and battered chicken has a flavoursome batter and a very tender feel to the meat and this can also be bought on its own in a much larger portion size with rice, cucumber and chilli garlic sauce.  The mixed satay I had was with agreeable meat (supplied by Ginger Pig in the market) and crunchy satay sauce.  The Singaporean curry is served with very tender chicken, a creamy curry sauce and rice.  A friendly note here – if you are wishing to take this away I would recommend asking for the rice to be placed in a separate container as the rice will have soaked all of the rich sauce up by the time you are home if you don’t ask this.

However, one of the jewels of the menu is the Hainanese chicken which is simply poached and hung chicken and is as tender and fragrant as they come.  You may be familiar with skinless chicken breast pieces you can get ready to eat in the supermarket? This is not that.  These are fresh, succulent and served warm (they keep longer through the day hung at a lower temperature as opposing to drying out faster under lamps) and the simple combination of this with the pickled vegetables, rice and chilli garlic sauce is a straight forward winner.  Perhaps the key dish you should have if you can only have one.

The carrot cake was nicely done and just to be clear, these are not orange carrots, they are sweeter, white carrots, or white radishes that are almost sponge-like when cooked in their cake form and are a traditional Singaporean sweet dish.  It is served with fried egg, preserved white radish and coriander and is a good example of having dishes made from scratch in front of you for an authentic experience. On a miscellaneous note, it has been a pleasure to visit each time and the team are friendly to chat with.  It is also very good to see Elizabeth Haigh leading from the front in the kitchen on each of our visits.

I gather Ms Haigh has designs on a London-based formal design concept of her own at some stage when ready, but settling this first Mei Mei and finishing a cookbook is taking care of her calendar availability pretty well in the meantime.  I will just have to be patient.  In the meantime, I don’t think you should be patient at getting to try here and although it means wrapping up warm for eating here in the cold outside, I would say this is the perfect time when the crowds are low as I am happy to bet my pension that the queues here in the summer will mean a far longer wait to getting any of the dishes, let alone a stool.

The arancini had a good sense of truffle (which I presume is the synthetic kind found in oil rather than real truffles) but were altogether a little dry.  Steak tartare which is a personal favourite was acceptable but just a little bland and flat for £19 irrespective of the cut of meat used (striploin). I was a little disappointed to see that tabasco was used instead of more homemade choices and the shallots, parsley and cornichons did not boost it enough either.   The chips on the side here are absolutely as basic as they come but thankfully are £3.50 which, is ludicrous when one looks at the mark up of being ready-made and bought in but thankfully not as expensive as they can be in restaurants.  There is scope to make these better as is a simple chip and to have a poor outer coating and barely heated mash inside makes this a bit of a strange offering to have at such a seemingly glitzy venue.  Perhaps it is the same at West Street which I will ask when next in.

Tuna carpaccio was satisfying with its ponzu dressing, avocado puree and coriander shoots.  Seared scallops came with risotto nero with Sicilian lemon salsa and was reportedly fine as was the lamb shoulder on mashed potato.  This is fine, but not a patch on places such as Whitebrook and those within the Joel Robuchon chain.  Tempura prawns came with cucumber, edamame, green papaya and green matcha sauce which was a very good sauce to have but sadly there is just no comparison for this type of tempura to how it is prepared in Japan.  The Ivy would not be alone here however, it can’t but help be a slight let down when it is and is a golden opportunity for The Ivy to be different from the rest.  Zucchini fries were ok but a little cold on arrival – appreciating they have a short heat life, they need to come out to the table immediately.

All in all, it was ok and is a lovely place to visit, but as mentioned, it simply does not have the uplift of food that the impression that the shiny exterior gives.

The only thing I wasn’t quite prepared for was the quarter of a pint of sauce in each one.  I would have actually been happy to trade half of that for more of the pasty as that was truly wonderful, but all homemade sauces were very beautifully done.

I didn’t try any of the savoury pastry / bakery products but Justin Gellatly provides cooking sessions in the bakery (where the doughnuts are made) only metres away from Borough Market and I am thoroughly tempted to go for either of these options.  An absolute must for anyone who likes doughnuts with a cup of tea and a truly lovely thing to finaly sink the teeth into.  Whilst there is not much morello go on other than doughnuts, they are a very fine version.

Drinks at the bar before dinner produced a very nice result in the vanilla vodka and white ‘mozart’ chocolate liqueur was quirky and fun.  It’s so similar to that which I had a City Social, it’s hard to say which one came first, but I’m afraid if there had to be a winner, there is no doubt it’s the City Social version hands down on this little battle.

The food was perfectly doable on the starters of boar on one side (rich, smokey mediteranean undertones with nice, layer of accompmanying cheese on top) and my cream of cauliflower velouté was asbolutely exquisite – I was genuinely surprised and pleased with this (surprised as I know the rough feel for the food already).  The soft shell crab was perfectly pleasant with wasabi, although the heat of the underneath sauce was such that I didn’t think it needed the large bed it was given so I left some of this aside.  All of this was followed by sharing the trio of chocolate, vanilla and toffee ice creams which, was difficult to say whether the ice cream was made on the premises or not, however the result was creamy and just about satisfying.

Overall, I would say that the Oxo Brasserie remains one of the most gorgeous venues available in London and that those that go are really going for the view and location as opposed to the food.  The food itself is pleasing but should not be confused with high end cooking (no real pride in the bread, rock hard butter at the table and a simple petit four in wrapper from a box as examples) but actually, to its credit, the Brasserie is not trying to be anything it is not – as long as one is prepared to have simple food and not expect anything else, it is a treat for the eyes as an experience with accompanying pleasing dishes.