The Sunday Times Archives - Nancy Lam's Enak Enak

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.

This article was written before Enak Enak got renovated and literally only had 8 tables.

“Who the f*** are you?” the question was unexpected in the circumstances, but none the less challenging. Who the f***am I, who the f*** are any of us? I paused for a moment to consider the transcendent metaphysical depths of existence. “Go sit your bony arse over there.” Righto, I sat in my appointed rickety chair. I’m not used to being talked to like this, not by waitresses, certainly not by small, round oriental waitresses wearing spectacles that look as if they were bought from a double-glazing salesman. I realised I was sporting a vast, dim grin. There’s something rather wonderful about an overtly obscene, theatrically rude mine host. When you spend a good proportion of your life being smarmed for money by oleaginous menu shufflers, a dousing in expletives is refreshing. Nancy Lam, the dim-sum shaped proprietor of Enak Enak is the sort of woman Madama Butterfly might have become if she’d phoned the Samaratans.

After serial vomiting, rude waiters cause the most hyperventilating fury in restaurant customers. It isn’t really rudeness that lassos the goat in us all, its the suave surliness, the glacial huffiness that implies we’re playing a little charade: we’ll pretend you’re always right, but really we know that the waiter’s never wrong. It’s the intimation of “Hurry up, I’ve got better things to do” in the poise of pad and pencil. The sort of waiter who slides pat tables like a shark being pursued by pilot fish; you’re more likely to catch the Pope’s eye on Easter Sunday than his. Personally, my dander is upped by the ladling of sticky warm, overfamiliar charm: the bellissima signora, touchy-feely, three-course friend. I can’t bear phoney, servile mateyness. That’s not to say I’m not happy to chat to a manager or waiter I know, but only if I remember them, not if they think they remember me. Snobbish, moi? Heaven forfend! I’ll speak to anyone in tails and a bow tie. Nancy Lam’s rudeness is masochistically moreish in the Dame Edna way. After years of yes sir, no sir, three pasta parcels full sir, it’s great to be told to move your “fat balls” under the table and eat up.

Enak Enak is a tiny restaurant on Lavender Hill in south London. I can never take Lavender Hill seriously. I know it was invented by Ealing film-makers. Appropriately, we went as a mob. Six of us virtually filled the restaurant. It’s a tiny front room with an even tinier box for cooking stuck on the far wall. Nancy comes out and swears and then goes and cooks with a large black man. I mean, she cooks on a stove, helped by a large black man. The room has been painted and has pictures, but that is not to imply it’s been decorated: there are snaps of children pinned to the wall and shelves of the sort of ornament that Lancashire loom operators’ widows bring back from off-season cruises round the Canaries. Oh, and there are Christmas lights in the window. All together, it exudes the homely, personal warmth that consortia of wannabe restaurant-owner bankers spend hundreds of thousands failing to re-create. It’s the sort of place that, if you found its cousin in Spain or Italy, you’d coo and smirk and pat yourself on the back for having come across a real find – but Lavender Hill? You don’t really rate homely, freshly cooked, cheap simplicity, if it’s just up the road from the sybaritic splendours of Clapham Junction.

Nancy’s filthy mouth shouldn’t distract from the tasteful eloquence of her skilful hands. The food is excellent, the menu apologises that she uses the very best, freshest ingredients with love, and tells us that we are to be patient. I hate to think what sort of tongue-lashing the impatient would be subjected to. We ate almost everything on the menu, starting with those weird prawn crackers that are so addictive when they’re warm from the pan. I’ve never fathomed their precise relationship to prawns. Kissing a frog and getting a prince is nothing compared to getting a cracker out of a prawn. Next, barbecued spare ribs, meaty and exuberantly seasoned – all too often these are like chewing something that’s been nicked off the alter of a Spanish church – and satay, a little stick that’s become a noisome calvary for anonymous bits of fibre in so many vaguely oriental restaurants.

Main courses were all utterly delicious and I’m not someone who generally smacks my lips and says, “Yum, yum, Far Eastern food again.” In fact, if the world’s lemon grass crop were to be eaten by locusts, I wouldn’t give a mikado, and I wouldn’t eat the locusts, either. In fact, I think that the next person who expresses a desire to open yet another Thai restaurant in London should be forced to sing selected highlights from the King and I in the nude in front of the home crowd at Stamford Bridge. But, having said that, good food is good food, wherever you find it.

Nancy says her cooking is straight Indonesian, the sort of thing that working-class families sit down to. The spicing is long on flavour and thankfully short on heat, although she did threaten to chilli up the curries to Gotterdammerung levels (flaming ring cycle) if she got lip. I might just single out the beef curry for particular mention. Beef isn’t a meat that’s commonly used in Asian cooking, and when it is the quality invariably hideous. This was a wonderful, fall-apart dish of the best-quality rump and was a good example of the fact that cow doesn’t have to be cooked with the bloody speed of an electrocution victim to be palatable. Carbohydrates were represented by extravagantly elaborate noodles, and rice poached in stock.

Puddings are a bit of an after thought. We got a perfectly nice pancake stuffed with stuff. Nancy, despite her best efforts, turned out to be a paper tiger and actually as sweet as mango chutney. I was about to say that you can’t be a nasty person and cook well, but, now I think of it, most of the best cooks I know are simply ghastly. Nancy is a joy and reason enough for going to Lavender Hill. Her cooking is an even better one. She complained that she had to be the waitress as well as cook because the restaurant didn’t make a lot of money, and I’m afraid with only six or seven tables and most main courses costing under a fiver,the value for customers is unbeatable but the economics aren’t promising. However she’s been going for 10 years and she’s certainly not starving. As we left, she took me aside and said: “Next time, call me up before you come and I’ll make you 24-hour soup, or, better, 48-hour soup. It’s really good, really sticky, sticky as …” I couldn’t possibly tell you what she said it was as sticky as, so go and get insulted yourself. You deserve it.

Deep fried prawns in Battersea by Craig Brown

Meek as a Lam by A A Gill

About

Keep in Touch