Lahpet Larder seemed like a great idea when we booked it, weeks before. A new south-of-the-river site opening for one of the city’s all-too-few great Burmese restaurants; a menu stacked with prawn curries slick with dark red oil, and tamarind-laced dipping sauces, and punchy, savoury-slanted cocktails, arriving just as London’s starting to slide into an autumn mode and I’m emotionally primed to recognise categories of comfort food that aren’t just hot dogs in a beer garden – and an evening catching up with an old pal, who I see so rarely now that our meetings count as reunions, and usually get treated with the kind of hedonism that deserves.
It’s a plan I’m thrilled about two weeks out, but now the night is nigh and it’s pretty clear we’re both coming into this dinner with baggage. Larry’s had an unintentionally excessive day; I had an unintentionally excessive night before: we spend the afternoon messaging each other with great conviction about ordering light and being home early and discretion being the better part of valour.
So, it’s on a wave of questionable decisions and with some quite puritanical intentions that we wash into Lahpet, bracing ourselves for impact.
But this turns out to be a ye-of-little-faith situation because Lahpet Larder is actually exactly where you should make a beeline for when you’re low energy and high neediness; a warm hug of a place delivering – from the decor to the service to the menu – a general feeling of cosiness and abundance and all the other descriptors a larder might conjure up for you.
Dan Anton and Zaw Mahesh have arrived in Bermondsey via some fiercely popular supper clubs and then bricks and mortar sites (Lahpet Shoreditch and Lahpet West End), without ever noticeably having a bout of difficult second album-itis. Their Larder comes with a menu mixing their classics with some new dishes, a slightly smaller space, and a small shop-shelf section selling some of their key, hard-to-find ingredients – so there is technically a larder-like, local-village-shop element to the restaurant, if your local village shop also surrounded you in a cocoon of warm copper walls, pale wood and dark greenery, or gently brought you fried chicken rolls and green tomato and Szechuan chilli dipping sauce, and stack after stack of napkins, without ever implying via look or word that an adult should really need fewer of these.
Still, if I were going to rank everything that contributed to the impressive comeback we both make, in order of importance: top of the list is the arrival bowl of Shan pickles. Despite eating these in a mildly obsessive way across different Lahpet visits I still can’t tell what’s happening in these to make them so good, beyond the obvious fact that they’re a little plate of pickles to crunch through while you drink a lightly bitter, lightly spicy betel leaf margarita.
Second, for level of impact, in a threeway tie: that margarita – betel leaf tequila, jaggery, lime and pink salt – from a cocktail list studded with shiso and Thai basil vermouth and cherry liqueur and, compellingly, a martini made with pickled tea oil-washed vodka; the tea leaf salad – pickled tea, double fried beans, tomatoes, garlic oil, little shards of garlic fried to a crunch, dried shrimp; and the king prawn sipyan, because it’s hard to feel out of charity with the world when you’re deshelling curry-slick prawns, big like a muscular fist, ruby-coloured oil pooling in the bowl and, increasingly, on my clothes.
Finally, honourable mention to the dessert we disappeared in sub-one minute, like two people who hadn’t made a solemn pact to eat light and get home early: the bubble waffle paratha that you drag through the frothy, sweet milk tea foam it comes with. If you’ve never had a bubble waffle paratha dipped in sweet milk tea foam, well, where have you been, quite frankly.
And by the time we leave into the night the versions of us who slid, fragile, into Lahpet at 7 o’clock feel like different people, from different lives.
I do not get home early. No regrets.
Lahpet Larder, 39-45 Bermondsey Street, London, SE1 3XF. For more information, and for bookings, please visit www.lahpet.co.uk.
