You know how, in a dream, you find yourself surrounded with familiar objects, landscapes and people but also with completely unfamiliar, surreal and alarming things? That sense of walking down a street near your old school which is also, somehow, a path on the side of the Grand Canyon, populated with giant talking lemurs? The Naamyaa Café made me feel like that. It's both Western and Eastern, basic and exotic, frank and inscrutable.
It's the newest thing from Alan Yau, one of the great innovators of the catering world. He's the chap who invented Wagamama in 1992 and introduced British lunchers to the restaurant as high-tech, spick-and-span Japanese works canteen. He sold the chain after five years, and launched the Busaba Eathai, a Westernising of the Thai eating experience. The Busaba interiors were dark and woody as saunas and the food was prepared by David Thompson, the Australian expert on Thai cuisine. It became the after-the-movie supper venue for Soho nighthawks, once they'd got over their British reluctance to share a table with strangers.
Now, after ventures with Chinese cuisine, he's offering Thai street food. Walk into the Naamyaa Café in Islington (soon to become a chain), and your eyes have to take in a lot of design. Four or five competing designers seem to have been turned loose on the interior. The far wall seems to be made of brown turf briquettes, inset with little gold Buddhas. The side wall is tiled with coral-on-white scenes of temples, hillsides and rustic wooing – the Siamese equivalent of Willow pattern. The bar stools are bamboo painted a tart's-lipstick-red. Above the pale pistachio banquettes, a cat's cradle of black wires holds a collection of yellow fairy lights. The overall effect of these warring designs is chaotic but rather jolly.
Read more at http://www.independent.co.uk/
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