We were expecting queues. Phed Mark is in town. The famous Phed Mark from Bangkok, who cooks one dish and one only, which goes in five levels of heat from ‘too hot for Brits’ to ‘put the loo roll in the freezer and pray to your god’. Phed Mark from an American called Mark who had a food blog and became obsessed with pad kra pao to the point that he opened his restaurant after years of research, now in the basement of The Platapian in Soho for three or so months. There had to be a queue. Might have been a queue. Who knows. We arrived at Euston station to the sky emptying and took a very expensive black cab over to Soho with no queue. God bless that awful British weather.
Phed Mark has dialed back the heat for the UK residency, to the point that it is now ‘very less spicy’ and ‘very spicy’, and I think, well at least from what we could hear, we were the only ones out of the twenty or so in the basement ordering ‘very spicy’. The menu is short; some starters from the restaurant upstairs, pad kra pao in beef, chicken, or veg, and a lobster special that’s forty quid and we were never going to order. You choose the protein, how hot, and if you want to add more fried duck eggs. I’ll get on to those eggs later, but ultimately that’s the viral sell; the thing that differentiates them from the other pad kra pao across the globe. The hard fried whites with the barely warmed yolks placed as multiples across the top.
The pad kra pao is good. Everything we hoped for really, though just like the ones you find at Speedboat Bar, only without the pool table. It’s spicy – really spicy – and fragrant with lots of holy basil. The fish sauce is more noticeable in the chicken than the beef, which seems sweeter and more garlicky. We only have one egg each and that’s enough, breaking it up and mixing it through the meat and rice. Two of the dishes, a beer, and a glass of wine, £58. It seems about right, though judging by my arse the following day, very less spicy would have been fine.
I’m glad we went. As we were paying up, Eating With Todd is escorted downstairs, where he sits, realises he doesn’t like the lighting and asks to be moved upstairs to the windows at the front of the restaurant. He seems fairly normal; none of this branded clothes bollocks that seems to have afflicted the industry, just a regular guy and his fiance out for some lunch. Back upstairs, whilst waiting for our Uber, it cuts a different picture to see him out in the wild. The gleeful rubbing of the hands like he’d seen his first pair of tits at a stripclub, the dangling of four egg yolks with a smile that says Farage has just taken Westminster (I have nothing against the bloke, honestly, though as an aside I do find the juxtaposition of supporting a man who wants immigrants gone, while profiteering from their cuisines a weird one). In the nine minutes we are waiting he doesn’t touch a bit of it. It has to be cold and I wonder why he would want to eat it now, before realising money, that’s why. Anyhow, he’s been so there will almost certainly be queues now. If you decide to join the back of it my only suggestion would be eating your dinner whilst it is hot.
8/10
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