'Did you go to the old Singburi?' the waiter asks as we tap our credit card on the reader at the end of lunch. 'No,' we admit, somewhat shamefacedly (should we pretend that we did?). 'I didn’t either,' she laughs. 'It was impossible to get in.'
The old Singburi, for those unfamiliar, was the rare London restaurant that could truly claim to be a cult restaurant. Founded on Leytonstone High Road by Tony and Thelma Kularbwong in 1999, it started out as a fish and chip shop, before evolving over the following two-and-a-half decades into one of the most talked about Thai restaurants in the country, with the Kularbwongs’ son Sirichai, who’d been helping out at the restaurant since he was a child, leading the kitchen. It was BYO, cash-only, and booked out months and months and months in advance. While it appeared on all the right lists—best this, best that—The Good Food Guide awarded it Local Gem status, not to damn it with faint praise, but to acknowledge that it was, in essence, a neighbourhood restaurant that was off-limits to all but the most dogged of diners willing to take a chance on a walk-in in Zone 3. Our inspector praised the cooking as 'pungent, lively and elegant' and summarised the venue pithily as 'family-run, cash-only, unfancy to its bones'.
In late 2024, the elder Kularbwongs announced their retirement, handing over the name to Siri who last week reopened Singburi in an entirely new guise in Shoreditch. He’s joined in the business by two friends: Alexander Gkikas, founder of Catalyst, and Nick Molyviatis, former head chef of Kiln in Soho.
It’s inevitable that people will compare Singburi versions 1.0 and 2.0. Let them. We can only take Singburi 2.0 as we find it, on the street level of a steel and glass new development in Shoreditch. It’s a clean break, pretty much, from what went before: the iconic rambutan poster ('Bushy, Juicy') that used to decorate the walls is now by the loos; the yellow shop signage hangs on an interior wall, but all else, the open kitchen, the Sunny D-coloured tables, the terrazzo floor, the breeze block walls, and recycled plastic benches are entirely new. The design by Bangkok’s Physicalist Architects is surprising, nothing like the dark and moody interiors found at other contemporary Thai restaurants (such as Smoking Goat, barely a minute away across Shoreditch High Street, and Kiln in Soho). By day, the sunlight streaming in, it resembles somewhere you might order a kale salad after yoga were it not for the vast grill, stacks of woks, and giant pestles behind the counter.
There was no sign of the famous blackboard menu when we there but we gather it is now back, enjoying pride of place in the window. On our visit, there’s just a sheet of coloured A5, drinks on one side, food on the other. The restaurant opened in the hottest week of the year and came prepared. And of course, a Thai restaurant serves the right things on a hot day! Watermelon and strawberry salad for one thing; radish, kohlrabi, and chilli jam salad for another. It’s promising that the menu has the day’s date at the top; that’s usually a sign of a restaurant that will roll well with the seasons. To drink, ice-cold beer in a good glass is just the thing for the weather, but there’s also a short by-the-glass wine list (by Ancestral Wines) and cocktails such as makrut lime leaf gimlet (by Athens bar The Clumsies). BYO, be gone.
From this first look at the menu, 'pungent, lively, elegant' remain accurate descriptors of the Singburi style. The food arrives at a clip; we could be in and out within an hour. We start with dill pork sausage, with chopped blow-your-socks-off chilli pepper on the side. Then comes northern raw beef larb, served with a thick tranche of raw cabbage, cucumber wedges, and sticky caramelised garlic cloves, and a bowl of mussels with a light and fragrant broth with just warmed through fresh tomato. We want dessert but are told they didn’t do it at the old place so aren’t doing it here. Which, of all the old ways to hang on to, is an odd one: some fruit or ice cream to finish would be perfect.
Clearly they have their attachments to the old place, and the customers will have theirs. But the exciting thing is seeing what Singburi can be now.
Reservations aren’t easy to come by—plus ça change—but they are open to walk-ins.
WHEN 19 June
WHERE Unit 7, Montacute Yards, 185‑186 Shoreditch High St, London E1 6HU
FOLLOW @singburi_e1
BOOK singburi.london
The Good Food Guide allows three to six months before anonymously inspecting a new restaurant. Look out for a full review coming soon.
