We have lor bak every Chinese New Year at Nicole’s family home. It’s a bean curd skin wrapper stuffed with minced pork (from our brilliant local butcher Uptons of Bassett), water chestnut, spring onion, and Penang 10 spice powder.
Five spice is a classic Chinese flavour but Penang likes to be even more Chinese than Chinese so they have a 10-spice blend with those recognisable flavours like star anise and cardamom but it’s got something extra, including nutmeg, which is widely grown in Penang. We either bring it in direct or, when we’re not going there much, we make it. We make all the spice blends, actually.
This is a favourite: bavette satay. It’s seasoned and then there’s fennel and cumin salt on top. We got the idea in Marrakech where they put cumin salt on grilled meats and you get this big hit of aroma. It comes with sweet soy sambal, kind of chunky with tomato, shallot, sweet soy sauce (kecap manis). When it’s in season, we serve the bavette with wild garlic sambal.
Then we’ve got either chicken or paneer satay – a little cumin salt on that too because it’s lovely. Then a peanut sauce, which is almost like making a curry in itself. Rempah is a Malay term for spice paste and that’s the base of lots of what we do. It starts with a huge volume that then comes down to a minute amount but with really intense flavours.
One of the things we did in the very early days of Lucky Lychee was lots of benchmarking in London. It was when all the restaurants were shut so we would book a hotel room and get takeaway from different places. One night we got five or six different prawn toasts from places like Hakkasan and Shikumen. We basically did a prawn toast deep dive from the hotel room and this is the outcome.
Ours is a bit different. We put herbs in like coriander and lime leaf so there’s a lovely lightness and citrussy flavour from that. And the herb salad alongside is dill, mint, lime leaf, shallot. It’s one of our hero dishes. It’s never off the menu and goes very well with a pint.
We make our bao so they’re fresh out the steamer. This was one of the early hero dishes. You get it in Maylasia but it’s more of a Taiwanese dish – gau bao. Bao have done a lot for popularising bao in London and we benchmarked ours against theirs.
This one is with night market chicken. In Malaysia the days are really hot so people go out after dark to eat. Night markets have always got loads of fried chicken vendors, each with their own way of marinating and breading and frying. We have a blend of rice flour, cornflour, tapioca flour, and gram flour as well because it’s got a nice flavour. We played around a lot with the mix to get the right amount of crunch and cragginess and tastiness.
Lots of people know som tam, a Thai salad. Kerabu is Malaysia’s equivalent. It’s often with cucumber or crispy fruits and vegetables. We pretty much always have cucumber and then we rotate: Mangoes when there’s nothing nice coming from Europe. Watermelons are just coming in from Spain so we’ve switched to watermelon this week. And when English sweetcorn comes into season we’ll do it with charred and steamed corn. The dressing is fish sauce and lime juice. And then from the belly of pork we buy in, we’ll render the fat (use that for cooking) and then dehydrate the skin and fry it to make those lovely puffed-up pork rinds.
Here we have char siu pork neck with hoisin and English cherries, served with Hampshire watercress in a sesame vinaigrette. The traditional way of making char siu is with maltose but we use a bit of fruit jam or seasonal fruit for the sweetness. We try to find local produce that has a similar flavour profile to things that you would find in Malaysia but get here. Rhubarb gives that burst of acidity so we put that in our fish curry rather than a little wild starfruit that Nicole’s mother uses. Wild garlic has a pretty similar flavour profile to garlic chives and there’s forests of it around here. It’s sustainable, local and tasty.
Nicole: My favourite is the honey Marmite fried chicken. I love fried chicken and Marmite chicken is a really popular Malaysian-Chinese dish that you can’t get in the UK, even though Marmite is from the UK. During lockdown I missed it so much that I made it and I thought, if I open a restaurant I need to have it on the menu. In the past when we’ve taken it off the menu customers complained, so now it’s on the menu permanently.
The beef rendang is our all-time hero dish. If you’ve tried any Malaysian food in your life, you’ve probably had rendang. We’re proud of ours and the extra touches that we put in like turmeric leaf, which is a pretty rare ingredient here but we get it direct from Thailand – it adds an amazing amount of earthiness. We also use really good local Dexter beef and a lot of time and ingredients go into the paste.
And how about a tom yum margarita? We made it for Winchester Cocktail Week last summer and it’s been so popular it’s been on the menu ever since. We make a lemongrass, galangal and lime leaf syrup and then shake with fresh coriander and chili. So it’s kind of like a picante but way better.
The pandan Basque cheesecake is a staple of the dessert menu. We worked for a long time to get that light, oozing texture just right, and we pair it with earthy, fragrant pandan... we just love it.
