ST ALBANS is the place where I ate my first kebab. Arzum made it for me in his little shop at the butt-end of a dimly lit mall and it was a thing of exotic wonder: grilled meat off the spit squirted with lemon juice, raw onion and tomato, garlic sauce, fluffy Turkish bread. Memories of Arzum’s kebabs still loom large in my mind, and not just because they were the size of house bricks.
When I returned for the first time in years to StAlbans recently I didn’t find Arzum’s. The largely southern-European neighbourhood of my youth now resembles an outpost of Hanoi, its main drag lined with Asian greengrocers, fishmongers and pho joints. But although kebab shops are light on the ground, the place I visited for lunch served something else I’d never eaten before: crocodile. The meat is white, slightly sweet and a bit chewy, sort of like a cross between chicken and calamari. It had been stir-fried with broccoli and onion in a fiery, gloopy XO sauce.
The croc was but one dish in an outstanding spread at Song Huong, a no-fuss twin restaurant that had a full house of mostly Vietnamese faces, which is always a good sign. Inside, waitresses in matching pink polos worked closely set tables to the sentimental sounds of an Asian ballad-singing contest on the big telly, delivering steaming bowls of soup, heaped noodles, stir-fried fish, buckets of rice and the like. Outside, men smoked and sipped Vietnamese iced coffee, a sweet and no doubt addictive drink that is drip-filtered from a small aluminium contraption into a glass of condensed milk, then poured over ice. To paraphrase the Scottish bairn from that old porridge ad, aye, it’s delicious, but it’s no’ how you make coffee.
Before the croc there was pho of a standard I’d go out of my way to taste again, made to the manager Mai Dan’s old family recipe.
The smell of citrus and coriander filled our nostrils as the soup arrived.
Bobbing around in the mouth-filling, salty-sweet broth was a virtual butcher’s bin of gnarled, fatty brisket, tendrils of tripe, neck, fatty beef tendon slices, squishy beef balls and slithery rice noodles. It was a challenging but bracing taste-textural combination.
We also tucked into an egg noodle soup with a steamed leg of duck laid on top, among bok choy and Chinese broccoli. Lurking beneath the surface of the broth, which was the colour of rich, dark soil, were a few shiitake mushrooms and a surprise prune, imparting an earthy and fruity flavour respectively.
Though it’s an old standard, fried salt and pepper quail is hard to pass up. This rendition, garnished with fresh coriander, spring onion and bird’s-eye chilli, was so good we devoured the bones.
Polishing off a whole fried flounder proved a more difficult, ultimately impossible task. Flounder is not the prettiest fish, and this specimen had been slathered in copious amounts of sweet, syrupy tamarind sauce. There were crispy little squares of pork fat and onion stirred through it for badly needed crunch, and the meat we prised off the bones had a fine balance of crispiness on the outside and soft fleshiness inside.
When I returned for the first time in years to StAlbans recently I didn’t find Arzum’s. The largely southern-European neighbourhood of my youth now resembles an outpost of Hanoi, its main drag lined with Asian greengrocers, fishmongers and pho joints. But although kebab shops are light on the ground, the place I visited for lunch served something else I’d never eaten before: crocodile. The meat is white, slightly sweet and a bit chewy, sort of like a cross between chicken and calamari. It had been stir-fried with broccoli and onion in a fiery, gloopy XO sauce.