Air on the G string: Sala Thong, Cambridge

This converted terrace house is one of a tiny cluster at the elbow of two of Cambridge’s most dreamy vistas. I imagine most of their clientele is punters (sic) who have taken a wander down the Backs or from The Mill pub, got distracted by their poetry book stained with the butter drips from crumpets and overshot their mark. My party went deliberately, and I’m still trying to work out why.

The main restaurant, decked out in the standard Thai carvings, was buzzy and crowded, a standard-looking dinner a deux diner. However, we were led through the downstairs room, pirouetting through spaces only the diminutive waitress could navigate with dignity, to a table in a neat little upstairs chamber with stained glass.

First impressions are so very important, I find: nearly as crucial as elbow room – and it boded ill when my 6 companions and I were instructed to squeeze on to a table for 4, my own chair squashed a clear foot to the right of my place setting. On requesting a transfer, we were told they were expecting a party of 20, so no deal. Needless to say, this booking greed enrages me. If you can’t fit the people, don’t take the booking.

Curmugeon rising, I started to suspect a lack of appropriate focus/expertise from the bill of fare, which was yards long. For what, boys and girls, does putty-faced catering magnate and amateur stripper Gordon Ramsay always suggest to the snivelling saps who allow him across their threshold? Cut the menu. Right. Down. How right he is (about this. JUST this, ok?).

However, the simple soup starters (tom yum, coconut) we ordered were inexpensive at under a fiver and very good – zingy, highly spiced, and generous with the seafood, though one of our party upgraded to a main course portion which was scarcely bigger, twice as expensive, and no more lavishly prawned. The non-Thai starters other people ordered looked revolting, but if you will order boerewors in Bombay (as it were) you only have only yourself to blame.

The atmosphere in the miniature chamber grew steadily hotter – and odder - as the meal progressed. Diners were startled periodically by the dumb waiter, whose arrival at our level was announced each time with exactly the same loud ‘bing, bong’ that informs you that passengers in rows 12 to 25 may now board. And by the main courses, the 20 table had arrived. Any such mass gathering, in a space the size of a minibar, would have been a severe trial to non-invited guests, but this one – all 18-year-old boys – was particularly uncongenial. Testosterone is no meet sauce for dinner. Perhaps their very presence can be explained by an hilarious misunderstanding of the word ‘thong’ …

Shouting above the – well – shouting, we ploughed through main courses which were trapped in a Bermuda triangle of the mediocre, the pointless and the plain offensive. A whole sea bass presented on an artful little burner with tea-lights (why?) was succulent but with no distinctive flavour, and the dry nuggets of crispy pork belly with ginger and white pepper were more a bar snack than an entrée. Pad thai came as a congealed mass slathered in sugar-sweet orange sauce (huh?). Even the dry clump of Thai sticky rice needed some committed jaw-work to turn into food.

The spicy prawn salad, however, was a cataclysmic failure of a dish. Priced as a main course at nearly a tenner, it came on a side plate. The six lonely prawns were aggressively chaperoned by sliced raw onion (what on earth?) and slivers of other low-grade saladery. Apart from being so spicy it was like gargling with formic acid, the thin sauce provided almost no flavour. It was a joke, and a poor one.

The only clear successes came in dishes even a roving anti-Thai-restaurant mole with an A* in sabotage couldn’t arse up. Apart from the soup, a beef red curry with butternut squash was pretty good, bathed in a bold and fragrant sauce that was periodically siphoned off by various members of the party to add moisture and flavour to their plates – though the pieces of ‘squash’ were 90% carrot. It would, of course, be bad form to note that the soup and beef curry were ordered by me – so I won't even think of doing so.

Oh, and my order of jasmine tea never came. And they had no coconut juice.

Rushed off their feet tending to the rugby team beside us, the staff failed to notice our wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth as we waited desperately for the bill so we could sign our release papers from the increasingly nightmarish scene. As we finally left, one partygoer was suggesting stridently that everyone ought to think up one reason ‘why Nick’s a wanker’.

We emerged to exquisite moonlight playing off the lapping water of the mill pond, panting and relieved. Never go back, ladies and gentlemen, never go back …

Comments

[giorgia]

Love the final image... the kind of image that needs no caption - aka every journalist's dream...

[Terentia]

Thanks for this Debbie! I've been to Sala Thong several times as it unaccountably seems to be popular with friends who think it a cool, cheap, unpretentious and genuinely ethnic place to go. (Very Cambridge sort of inverted snobbish attitude.) However, I've always found the place cramped and disappointing. The best memory has always been the jasmine tea - which is nothing special but tellingly the tastiest item I've had there! I shall now be able to refer friends to your blog and never go again. The Keralan Rice Boat almost next door is much better.