After stints at Spitalfields and Market Peckham, Abby Lee’s Malaysian concept Mambow has finally landed a proper permanent spot in Clapton
And we’re very glad it has, as it’s some of the best Malaysian food you’ll find in London. The new site is on Lower Clapton Road, a fairly small one-room set up with an open kitchen and tightly packed chairs. There’s metal tables and colourful plates to give that proper street food bustle vibe, and a thumping loud soundtrack – beware if you’ve had a heavy weekend!
On the menu you’ll find a short sharp selection of dishes created by Abby, who grew up in Singapore working in family bakeries before coming to London via stints in Malaysia and Italy. The menu represents the broad landscape of influence and cuisine found in Singapore and Malaysia, blending Chinese with Indo-Malay ingredients, flavours and spices.
We loved the snack of lor bak, crispy fried slices of pork and prawn roll, served with an insanely good chilli vinegar jam, as well as the crispy otak-otak prawn toast wrapped in betel leaves. We had to restrain ourselves from immediately ordering both of these again.
A grilled banana blossom salad with sambal oelek and spicy peanuts was a nice fresh interlude before the main event – two excellent curries. First, a black pepper chicken curry, a family recipe from where Lee is from in Perak in Northern Malaysia, made with Sarawak black peppercorns, an Indian-style curry powder, curry leaves and red onion. Then, a Malay-style pineapple curry topped with garlic chive dumplings, that had a beautiful balance between sharp, tangy pineapple and those crispy fried dumplings. The only thing we’d like to have seen is a bit more of the sauce on both these dishes.
To drink, there’s lots of nice natural wines, new cocktails, and soft drinks like milk tea, to stand up to that Malaysian heat.
If you’ve not been to any of the previous iterations of Mambow, now’s the time to put that right – you won’t regret it.
78 Lower Clapton Road, Lower Clapton, London E5 0RN
@mambow_ldn