Grace Dent on restaurants

Bong Bong’s Manila Kanteen, London E2: ‘It's a get-stuck-in kind of joint’ - restaurant review

A slightly chaotic but warm-hearted Filipino street-food joint that doesn’t play by the rules

When BBQ Dreamz scooped £350,000 on BBC Two’s My Million Pound Menu last year, the cash came with the advice that their street food stall’s name suggested nothing of its Filipino flavours and that a name upgrade was sorely needed. “Hold my coat,” they replied – or at least I like to think they did – before settling on Bong Bong’s Manila Kanteen and opening their first bricks-and-mortar site in east London. No one is going to forget that name. Or miss the enormous, American mustard-yellow and neon-pink electric sign in the window of their new Hackney Road premises.

Bong Bong’s Manila Kanteen sounds like a jazz-fusion noise-terror 12-piece who are here to liven up your wedding. In actual fact, for those not au fait with the Filipino political landscape, Bongbong is the nickname of Imelda Marcos’ son, the politician Ferdinand Marcos Jr. Researching the heady life and times of Bongbong – from child star to senator, and on to his latest bid to revise the textbooks and gloss-coat the doings of his dictator father – led me down such a delicious wormhole, I really needed my dinner by the time I scrambled out of the house.

Luckily, at Lee Johnson and Sinead Campbell’s first restaurant, they intend to feed: pleasing bowls of aubergine kare kare (a curry of turmeric, coconut and peanut) and crisp pata (pork hock with liver sauce), as well as daikon noodle salads, satay duck hearts on skewers and plenty of jasmine rice and adobo-glazed chicken wings.

That term “adobo” is being flung around a great deal throughout Britain right now. As a technique, it’s most likely to involve a marinade made from the likes of white vinegar, soy sauce, garlic, peppercorns and bay leaves. After the meat is soaked in this mixture, it’s simmered in its marinade on the stove top, before being browned in oil, all of which leads to an intense double hit of that marinade plus the crispness from the pan. Well, adobo means more or less that in the Philippines at least; let’s leave the ramifications of adobo the Mexican sauce and adobo the Caribbean seasoning for another week.

One thing is for sure, though: Bong Bong’s is not a stand-on-ceremony kind of place. Harking back to its street food era, it’s a take your family and friends and get stuck in kind of joint. And, yes, it might get messy, so don’t fret about dripping coconut milk or lime aïoli down your front. Johnson, who is of Filipino heritage and says that the food is inspired by his time in Manila, tells me that for his Sunday kamayan (feast) sharing plates, he has dreams of doing away with the cutlery altogether, because who needs it for soy’n’ginger ribs and adobo cauliflower? He also dreams of replacing the sofa section of the room – currently used for cocktails – with a karaoke screen.

There’s a quietly bubbling sense of rebellion in the heart of each and every street food operator who opens a “proper restaurant”. It’s almost as if they’ve already seen the very best and very worst of human beings, which leaves them uncowed and slightly unflappable. Also, they refuse to play by known rules of restaurant conduct.

Bong Bong’s is an object lesson in this. I can’t say it’s the best food I’ve eaten in 2020 so far, but the place is warm-hearted and definitely weird, decked out with pot plants and a plastic living greenery wall, plays Gil Scott Heron and serves White Russians made with Milo chocolate and malt milk powder and Maltesers. It is childlike and slightly chaotic, but also very confident.

Our server was on her first shift at Bong Bong’s and we were her third-ever customers. As a cold chill swept the room, as so often occurs when my vampire presence starts to be noted, she remained thoroughly unflustered and, on top of our order of kare kare, rice, pickled smacked cucumber and a feisty chilled noodle salad that featured enough red pepper to blow me to Mars, she somehow managed to talk us into ordering a whole tilapia as well. It arrived simply roasted, and festooned with chilli and coriander, its face glowering, but well worth the effort to dismantle.

We ate two large, hot, crisp banana and cinnamon spring rolls with a generous scoop of some of London’s best, ridiculously rich vanilla ice-cream to finish.

“That place is totally bonkers,” Charles said as we walked to the car.

“It’s not like anywhere else,” I replied. “It’s like a cafe that started by accident in someone’s living room. You could go in your pyjamas and I don’t think they’d notice.”

We’re going again next Sunday.

• Bong Bong’s Manila Kanteen 460 Hackney Road, London E2, 07752 315088. Open Tues-Fri 6-11pm, Sat noon-3pm and 6-11pm, Sun 11am-6pm. About £20-25 a head, plus drinks and service.

Food 7/10
Atmosphere 7/10
Service 9/10