Nancy Lam's Enak Enak

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Deep fried prawns in Battersea by Craig Brown

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A very warm thanks to Craig Brown, one of the first journalists to put Enak Enak on the map!

My cousin Caroline – no mean foodie, being the guiding hand behind the famous Porkinson’s Sausages-told me, long ago, that I might well enjoy a marvellous little place in Battersea called Nancy Lam’s Enak Enak. Alas, I instinctively shy away from marvellous little places in Battersea, and somehow the title ‘Nancy Lam’s Enak Enak’ made me shy away still more. When my cousin Caroline added that Nancy Lam was a terrific character, I thought to myself that I would make every effort to give it a miss.

Time passed, and, many months later, I found myself trying to think of somewhere to eat in Battersea. Looking down a list of restaurants, I saw ‘Nancy Lam’s Enak Enak’, and I remembered that old cousinly recommendation. Very well, I thought: Enak Enak it is, and off we set.

My companions for the occasion arrived before me. They are, I would say, Chelsea people, more used to San Lorenzo and Meridiana than to Indonesian restaurants in Battersea, so I was expecting long faces and bitter taunts. Far from it. “As far as I’m concerned,” declared one of them when I arrived, “this is the best place I’ve ever been to.” This was uttered before a mouthful of food had to come. The casual, jolly atmosphere of this scruffy little restaurant and the cheeriness – kiss, kiss, kiss, ho, ho, ho – of Nancy Lam were, he thought, just what the doctor ordered.

From the outside, Nancy Lam’s Enak Enak is pretty unprepossessing. Situated on a dank part of Lavender Hill, it resembles nothing more than an average greasy spoon café. Inside, there is a thin grey carpet of the type found on the floor in pawnbrokers’ offices and there is a fridge situated somewhere around the middle of the eating area with a plaster cat on top of it. The walls are whitewashed, the bright green chairs available in job lots from any kitchen warehouse. Shelves are scattered with a variety of keepsakes, with postcards and greetings cards stuck at random to the walls, alongside little pictures of exotic birds and flowers. A blackboard hangs above the opening to the kitchen, on it chalked, FISH MENU £5.50 COD SQUID AND SALMON. ‘Enak Enak’, one of our party had discovered, means ‘yummy, yummy’. This was realised, was no place for a blind date with Elizabeth Anson.

A message on the table menu sets the tone, that mixture of bossiness and chumminess which I have often noticed in the past, is often to be found in a good kitchen. ‘Nancy cooks with love using the very best and freshest ingredients. As no monosodium glutamate or preservatives are used some dishes take time to perfect, so please be patient, relax and enjoy’. Another message, on the front of the menu, announces, ‘Birthday or business celebrations our delight’. My brother-in-law, with many years experience of the advertising business and its assorted celebrations, scoffed “I bet!” The very idea that even the most liberal restaurateur could actually be delighted by the prospect of a business celebration, with all the whoops and gropes and wolf-whistles it would entail, seemed to him perfectly ludicrous.

While Nancy Lam herself could be seen over the counter tolling in the kitchen, a less forceful, equally smiley waitress came and asked if we were ready to order, calling me “Massa”. We ordered a bundle of things to start with, helping ourselves from each other’s plates. The satays – six generous sticks – earned high praise, particularly the crunchy peanut sauce. “As far as I’m concerned the whole thing is absolutely fab,” said the other Chelsea friend, thrusting a satay into his mouth, without, so far as I could see, removing the stick.

I have never really seen the point of spare ribs. They seem to me a rather exhausting way of getting your hands all clammy and ending up with a luminous red Russell Davies-style goatee beard around your mouth. If Nancy Lam’s barbecued spare ribs didn’t quite win me over, they were at least chunky and meaty and extremely tasty. I would imagine that their hearty, outdoorsey quality might appeal to The Duke of Edinburgh, though his delight might be offset with corresponding distaste for the slovenly behaviour and general attitude of some of his fellow customers, not to mention the staff.

My brother-in-law, whose reputation within the international advertising community has, alas, been fataly damaged by my vivid description of his short-tempered behaviour in a Balham Indian restaurant a couple of months ago, was making every effort towards geniality. He pronounced Nancy Lam’s Herbal Soup “excellent – one of the oddest I’ve ever tasted. Its clear chicken soup with odd bits and pieces in it – a sort of Indonesian consommé, and very good indeed. Mmmm.”

By now we were all purring merrily away. A Chelsea friend declared the batter on her deep fried prawns to be “paper thin and the prawns to be delicious”, a silly mistake, as then we all wanted one.

As we about to plunge into our main courses, Nancy Lam began making the rounds of her little restaurant, laughing and joking with those she had not met before, and hugging those she had. Alas, I’m very English about Great Characters, especially when they own restaurants. Tremors leap up and down my backbone when I see them begin to circulate, and I blush and whimper when they finally arrive at my table, closing my eyes, muttering “lovely, lovely” and hoping that they’ll push off. My brother-in-law, though, is very good with them. There is nothing he likes more than repartee. This meant that when Nancy Lam arrived at our table, he was happy to take the main brunt of her jollity. A beaming, plumpish figure, she was wearing a brightly-coloured apron illustrated with a page from the Bash Street Kids. In one of the scenes, Smiffy and the others are chorusing “We Want Jelly”. During an awkward silence, during which we were smiling at Nancy and Nancy was smiling back at us, my brother-in-law read off Nancy’s apron, “We Want Jelly”. This, it turned out, was like a red rag to a bull. “Yeeaaah!” exclaimed Nancy, placing a hand over each of her bosoms and wobbling them around. “These jellies never set!!!” I doubt whether this is part of the suggested small talk one is taught at the Prue Leith Restaurant School, but I may be wrong.

Our main courses were way up to standard. Like the starters, many of them had cheerful, almost Hooray Henry, names. Treasure Hunt Chicken is a chicken breast cooked with lemon grass and fairly hot spices, its taste nipping back and forth between spicy and savoury. Nasi Goreng takes the biscuit for off-putting names (“mmmm … I could murder a Nasi Gorens”) but turned out to be a great mound of fried rice with an ample sufficiency of prawns, and all very delicious.

I was just jotting a few of these names down in my little pad when who should loom up once more but Nancy Lam. “You writin’ love letters?” she said, laughing. Then she had second thoughts. “You writin’ about us?” she said. I ummed and erred. Generally I have found that if a restaurateur suspects that you are a reviewer he will start to fawn all over you, offering you drambuies on the house, dinner dates for two, free money, and so on. Not so Nancy. “Well, you can F**K OFF” she said, and I instantly warmed to her. Only my brother-in-law, diverting her attention with fresh recitals of the “We want Jelly” joke, brought the atmosphere back onto an even keel. When I asked her the secret of her excellent stock, she was our best friend again.

After a Kueh Dada – a small, sweet and quite excellent pancake roll with coconut, brown sugar and ice-cream – we paid the modest bill and shuffled off into the Battersea Drizzle amidst much waving. A stone’s throw from Marco Peirre White’s Harveys, Nancy Lam offers warmer hospitality, a better class of abuse and jolly good food, and all for a fraction of the price.

Knickerless Nancy: the first shock-wok by Tim Hulse

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In her heyday, Nancy’s Channel 5 TV show pulled in over half a million viewers. Here is an article from way back then. Please also check out http://www.youtube.com/NancyLamTV for her current videos. Happy Watching!

THREE weeks on from the launch of Channel 5 and what have we got? A lot of young people, that’s what. It’s the one thing you can’t help but notice – all the presenters are really young. Switch it on at any time of the day or night and you’ll find a young man in a bright shirt bringing you the latest news or a young woman with a big smile telling you the latest showbiz gossip. The main newsreader is even called Kirsty Young, which is surely more than coincidence.

And of course they’re all very nice and well-meaning, and they’re easy on the eye (although I have to say I have a difficulty with a news bulletin delivered by some callow youth wearing hair gel). But you do end up with the rather worrying impression that the gene pool has shrunk to the extent that the world is peopled by earnest youngsters with a mission to be polite.

Thankfully, being polite is the one thing Nancy Lam could never be accused of. Nancy presents her very own in-your-face Oriental cookery show every Thursday evening and she’s quickly becoming Channel 5’s first big star. With her brightly coloured hair, wacky glasses and toothy grin, she looks a little like Janet Street-Porter (if Janet Street-Porter were to lose a couple of feet in height and then contract some sort of serious thyroid complaint, obviously) and she has one of the most manic laughs you’ll ever hear (“ha-haa-ha-ha-haaaaaa!”). Each week she conjures up culinary magic in her wok, occasionally breaking off to chivvy her amiable Ghanaian husband, Ben, for the ingredients. “Quick Ben! Courgette!” It’s great entertainment.

When we meet for lunch in a restaurant in Soho’s Chinatown, Nancy’s hair is dyed in Channel 5 rainbow colours, something she did for the station’s launch, and she’s wearing a pair of her trademark specs.

So how many pairs of glasses does she have?

“Why don’t you ask me how many pairs of knickers I have?” Nancy responds, ever the one to be outrageous should the opportunity should arise. I have to confess this wasn’t on my list of questions, but at times like this it’s often best to go with the flow.

So how many pairs of knickers does she have?

“Not many pairs. I can’t bloody afford them! Ha-haa!”

This theme of poverty is one she returns to often. Nancy grew up in Singapore, where her father ran a small prawn cracker factory, and in 1970, when she was in her twenties, she set off for London. She spoke very little English, but this didn’t stop her training as a nurse. And it was while working as a nurse in East Molesey in Surrey that she met Ben. It was love at first sight, apparently, and they were married on Valentine’s Day, 1976.

So why move into cookery?

“Nursing was so badly paid.” She says. “And I love cooking.”

She started with home catering, then sub-leased a café in Putney and ran a restaurant there in the evening. Finally, in 1986, the pair opened their very own restaurant, Enak Enak, in Lavender Hill, south London.

You can see the restaurant each week in Nancy’s show. I haven’t been there, but it seems to be frequented by the sort of young people who present programmes on Channel 5. Nancy is famous for being rude to her customers, but she admits it’s a performance, all part of the business. I get the feeling she’s quite a shrewd cookie, despite the pleas of poverty. “I’m very serious when it comes to business,” she says. And she comes from a family of traders after all.

Nancy admits it’s sometimes hard to be the person everyone expects her to be, but she wouldn’t have it any other way. And she’s very happy to be here. As the meal comes to an end, she gets all sentimental as she lists the pleasures of her life in England. “I have a house, I have gardening, I have lots of friends, I have fish, and the fish when they see me, their mouths open…”

It’s time to go.

“That’s it?” says Nancy. “You happy with that/ Good, you can piss off now. Ha-haaa-ha-ha-haaaaaaaaaaaaa!”

Fifty Bucks – or the dragon eats you alive By Andrew Billen @ The Observer

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This article is an oldie but goodie. It was written around the time Nancy had her Channel 5 TV series.

What you mustn’t go for – what you do not get – at Nancy Lam’s restaurant, Enak Enak, is a nice, quiet Indonesian curry. You don’t get shown to your table. You do not get your placement unobtrusively finessed by perfectionist waiters. You are not thanked and asked to come again by the maitre d’. Nancy tells you to park your ass over there. She throws the plates down as if they are gauntlets. And although the rest of the waitressing is by her daughter, and servile enough, at the end for the meal, Nancy emerges for the umpteenth time from the kitchen to give you the finger. The compensation is Nancy’s cooking, which, as half a million viewers of her Channel 5 show will have guessed, is good and refined and, therefore, not like her at all.

All those who, when they enter her eight-table front room in Lavender Hill, south London, do not also enter the spirit of Enak Enak are doomed. An intense young couple at a window table on my left make the huge mistake of being more interested in each other than the food and get complimentary cold shoulder of Nancy. Bill paid, they are told to piss off. But I am in trouble, too, because the non-appearance of my date is becoming obvious. Nancy wanders outside to have a look for her. “Me tits is fwozen,” says Nancy, who speaks Cockney but retains her oriental way with her rs, or, as she would say, her arse. As the minutes yawn and I cannot bear to pretend to read the menu any more, I know there will no room in this room for my private anguish.

Soon the whole restaurant is apprised of my humiliation, although, to Nancy’s credit, once she has spread the word, she is nice about it and does not make a show trial of me. She actually offers to dine with me, provided I pay. The big-eating party of diners to my right assures me that this is the one restaurant in town where you can eat alone, by which they mean it is the one restaurant in town in which you will never eat alone. To prove it, a blonde woman on the table to my left offers me a forkful of her chicken with tamarind, which she correctly describes as delicious. Nancy cooks me a consolatory starter of BBQ prawns, which she marinates, cooks over charcoal and serves with lemon juice. These are succulent little objects, crisp on the outside, fluffy inside, and it is rude of me to note that, at £7.25, they are more expensive than most of the main courses.

“Wa? You fink dey are pwarns like a pwarn cocktail?”

So these are fresh, not frozen?

“Fwozen fwesh,” she says, and there’s an end on it.

Nancy Lam, the madwoman who looms, cleaver in hand, from urban billboards advertising the number 5, came out of Singapore 27 years ago and comes shrieking out of your television set on Thursday nights, shouting instructions on how to work lemon grass and cashews. But neither the cultural confusion of the Far East nor television’s compulsive generation of personalities quite explain Nancy’s provenance. My guess is that she was dreamt up by a D.C Thompson cartoonist who watched horrified as his creation, Nancy Lam, The Cook from Hell, upped, satay skewers and escaped from his strip cartoon into the real world, shouting “Enak Enak!”

Dressed rotundly in a batik print, goggled by a pair of spectacular spectacles and with a fright of spikey hair dyed all the colours of oil slicked in a puddle, she looks more like a cartoon than a person. But I may just be picking up on the heavy hints dropped by her apron, which bears the violent imprint of the Dundee comics stable, and by the Noddy green restaurant itself, which has Dennis the Menace effigies hanging around its walls like felons from scaffolds and papier Mache balloons made of Beano covers.

It is into this bizarre grotto that my guest innocently calculations, 15 by hers. The restaurant applauds her ironically, and Nancy gives her a dressing down before granting her absolution on the grounds of her youth and beauty as do I). The blonde tamarind-sharer looks put out. “Habba gwass of wine, love,” orders Nancy of my guest, who was hoping for a nice, quiet Indonesian curry.

There follows a quiet period of catching up and house-white drinking, while Nancy cooks us a mix of satay, prawns and pieces of spareribs, a starter that is just fine, although I find myself falling into Enak Enak’s prevailing orthodoxy of wild praise for its owner, as if Nancy is some dragon who may be appeased only by a series of sacrificial compliments. The main course is a real triumph, a completely succulent dish called rendang pieces of rump steak “cooked with exotic spices and finished with coconut cream”. Nancy asks if anything disappointed us and we say no, although (actually) the chicken with cashews nuts did seem a little on the bland side of delicate.

By now it is dark, the young lovers have gone and Nancy is full throttle of sexual innuendo and abuse, not all of it coherent; “She played with herself and it popped up” she paraphrases one diner who has mentioned, for some reason, the immaculate conception. “Doon wowwy about her,” she says, referring to the stranger who had offered me comfort and has now departed, “shewalesbian.” On my way downstairs to the loo, I rub against an apron augmented with a giant pair of plastic mammaries. The translation from Singapore to the modern mainstream West has loosed in Nancy a libido that would scare Naomi Wolf.

There follows a post-prandial joke interlude in which her Ghanaian-born husband, Ben prompts her furiously from the wings. Ask for the story about he passenger on Singapore Airlines with a sore tooth. A tine of Quality Street is handed round. I realise I have never met a woman more like a school boy.

With a pancake roll filled with coconut and brown sugar and a home made sorbet, dinner including wine, comes to £58.35, which seems excellent value, although Nancy tells me to tell you: no 50 bucks, no bother come. She started catering 12 years ago, and Enak Enak nearly went “up shit creek” in a series of recessions. Channel 5 may be making her famous but, she promises, it is not about to make her rich. With sufficient psychological preparation, you’ll really enjoy Enak Enak, a theme restaurant whose theme is Nancy.

The Guardian Life & Style – A little place that I know

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The only time I stray south of the river is to eat at this great Indonesian. Nancy’s an old mate – we go back 20 years. I love her satay and spare ribs, as well as the lobster with coconut milk, which she does as a special. It’s a real family-run restaurant, with Nancy’s husband and three daughters all working in the business.

By Marco Pierre White

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle

Evening Standard’s Mark Bolland is the Restaurant Spy

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I went to New York for a couple of days last week; partly to work, partly to shop, and partly just to get away. The energy of New York is a great antidote to the relative flatness of post-Christmas London, and luckily I was there during a mini heatwave (an excellent excuse to shop even more because I had foolishly taken full winter regalia).

Like most people, I loathe this time of year and try to travel as much as possible to distract myself from the blustery wind, relentless rain and cold. It’s also a wonderful way of injecting pace into a new year, and forcing yourself to look forward. What this grey period badly needs is an explosion of life and colour (a project for our next Mayor perhaps), so when I arrived back from America I innocently set off in the direction of Lavender Hill, where I’d heard I might find some. (What could be more redolent of summer than lavender?)

If the name sounds Arcadian, the area most definitely isn’t. Although it’s named after the lavender industry that used to flourish here in the preindustrial era, there’s no longer any rustic charm or scented purple shrub in this part of South London. Just a very long and unappealing road full of shops and traffic that stretches upwards from Clapham Junction. Sarah Ferguson used to live here – but we mustn’t hold that against it.

Lavender Hill is also home to Enak Enak, an Indonesian restaurant run by the sometime TV chef Nancy Lam. The unpronounceable name is Indonesian for ‘yummy’.

B is the new A-list – particularly with chefs. Last week I ate at a place that had Ramsay’s name above the door, but you wouldn’t expect to see him there. Nancy Lam’s is, too, and you certainly can’t miss her, with her crazy hair and big smile. In fact, she’s everywhere – but not in terms of newsprint – simply happy to be working. I even saw her in Mahiki when I was there in the summer, where she’s in charge of their menu. She devotes her physical energy – and not just her name – to a project. And it works. It really works.

Despite its unprepossessing exterior, Enak Enak is a real Tardis of a restaurant – much bigger inside than out and softly lit with faux Art Deco panels that are oddly soothing. The whole place has surprisingly good feng shui, which is presumably why it is rocking with an interesting variety of diners – some local and some who clearly travel across London. The walls are adorned with photos of Nancy and her celebrity mates: various footballers, chefs, critics and media folk. The stairs carry a variety of Dennis the Menace rucksacks.

This is a temple to high camp: Judy Garland would have felt at home.

I’d taken my friend Eric Lanlard, cake-maker to the stars, who is a dashing, headturning Frenchman (known in the business as ‘Cakeboy’). He and Nancy have done a bit of TV together, so he was delighted when she blazed over to say hello, before going downstairs to cook.

We ordered Chateauneuf-du-Pape, though the icing on the cake for Eric was seeing Singha beer on the menu, which apparently he had drunk nonstop while travelling in Indonesia in the days before mortgages and business put paid to his backpacking. We started with the paper-wrapped prawns (plump, juicy and ambrosially delicious) and an unbelievably tender chicken satay, which was in a class of its own. Next we feasted on Thai green chicken, sweet and sour prawns, pak choi and the famous nasi goreng, the Indonesian version of fried rice.

You will have heard of, and probably tried, most of the dishes on the menu before but never, I’ll wager, cooked as beautifully as in the kitchen here. Your past experience of Indonesian food would be like comparing a frozen TV dinner with your mother’s Sunday roast.

Afterwards, we were tempted by banana fritters, which were crisp, melting and just the right side of sickly to be the perfect pudding.

It was a glorious hotchpotch of an evening – as uncool as could be – and even though I was miles from home, it made me ridiculously glad to be back in London. Helpful and smiling staff, including Nancy’s divine daughter, were the nicest I’ve met in a long time. Nancy greets her customers in a uniquely welcoming and positively maternal way. You could say she’s the original Yummy Mummy.

About

Nancy Lam is a restaurateur and TV chef specialising in Indonesian and Asian food

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