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I had never eaten Indo Chinese food before I visited Fatt Pundit in Covent Garden, but if it’s always a good as the meal I had here, then I like it. A lot…
Lead Image: Fatt Pundit/Joe Howard
Asian fusion is a thing, but it doesn’t always shape up to be a proper marriage of styles and culture.
If personal choice is involved, I generally avoid fusion restaurants, as I usually just end up eating something rather generic while pondering the separate sushi menu and whether or not I could have picked a better restaurant.
(As a side note, I imagine another exception to this is Yes Vegan, an Italian-Korean restaurant in Shoreditch. I’ve never been, but I’m curious. It serves a kimchee lasagne which sounds like a mongrel of a dish but intriguing nonetheless.)
Indo-Chinese, however, takes two flavour-powerhouses of culinary styles and puts them together in a deft kind of way.
The result is not gentle mix of flavours, despite being crafted with skill and finesse, but more a gutsy range of combinations that pleasing loiter around after the plate has been (metaphorically) licked clean. At least, that’s how it plays out at Fatt Pundit.
As Fatt Pundit and the Internet tell it, Indo-Chinese food was born in Kolkata from the waves of Hakka traders and workers migrating from Canton from around the 1700s onwards.
They began cooking up the comforts of home with Indian supplies; mixing up techniques and flavours, substituting hard-to-find ingredients for those that were on hand, adding this and adding that throughout the centuries, until we fast forward to now, and Indo-Chinese cuisine is its own distinct culinary thing and myself and my pal Steve are hungry for it. Really, really hungry.
We arrived at Fatt Pundit in Covent Garden a little early and were quickly charmed.
The second of two Fatt Pundits, the Covent Garden outpost opened late last year, and is one of those places that is a treat but casual enough not to make you wish you had changed your outfit.
It is a snug restaurant found in the heart of Theatre Land with touches of Indian script and decorative Chinese plates on the raw and deliberately unpolished walls – if the interiors were to represent the fusion of two cultures, then well done, they nailed it without being on the nose.
It’s also inviting and friendly, as was our waiter who ushered us into our booth and promptly got the drinks and ordering taken care of, so all Steve and I had to do was to make small talk about uninteresting things while we both tried to take our minds off how hungry we were.
The food started to arrive in chapters and if I’m honest we ate like horses, devouring the rolling wave of plates and bowls of food as swiftly as they arrived.
And although the dishes practically evaporated soon after they were placed in front of us, we didn’t miss that each one had the comfort of eating something familiar but also the joy of trying something new.
Momos arrived first – steamed balls of spiced chicken, and tofu and vegetables sitting in a brothy puddle encased in a sturdy shell were dipped into a sweet chutney.
Then, salt and pepper okra in a light crunchy tempura batter was rolled in a bright mint sauce, and chilly paneer wrapped in a chewy, peppery coating that tasted like the Chinese restaurants of childhood dinners out.
Bombay Chilly Prawns arrived on our table too. The fat, nuggetty prawns came in a glue-like batter and coated in a sticky sauce with chunks of stir-fried peppers mixed in, and also had a delightful chew.
While this already sounds like a full meal in itself, we were only getting started.
On recommendation, we tried the lamb chops – hunks of meat on the bone, rubbed in a masala spice mix and grilled so that the charcoaled-infused meat was so tender it dissolved once in your mouth.
The popcorn chicken was as recommendation as well, and turned out to be addictive morsels of chicken also on the bone which lingered on your lips long after the last bite.
Perhaps the most Indian of the dishes we made short work of was the monkfish – a pool of sunflower-coloured curry with a drizzle of yolk-orange oil surrounding a small island of grilled fish.
Admittedly, this was a lot of food, but surprisingly it wasn’t the end, for a flaming, gooey-centred chocolate brownie with a dollop of ice-cream arrived on our table while we were feeling both victorious and defeated.
I’m not sure where brownies fit into either Chinese or Indian culinary repertories, but who cares? Nobody likes a pedant, and although Steve and I had out done ourselves by this stage, the brownie beckoned us to get stuck into it, one spoonful of warm rich chocolate pudding and melting ice – cream after the other, as the last and final act of our epic saga of a meal.
Address: 6 Maiden Lane, WC2E 7NA
Website: fattpundit.co.uk
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