Blue Elephant – Thai in Fulham Broadway

Walking through the busy stretch of shops and restaurants in front of Fulham Broadway, you might pass the Blue Elephant and assume the exterior of the restaurant says all you need to know about this place. Granted, it’s not particularly bad from the outside, but it just doesn’t look that special – you might imagine a big open room with bland furnishings and tedious atmosphere, and service and food to match suit.

But, if by chance you decide to head out to a local Thai joint and aren’t sure where to go, you might come across some surprisingly good reviews for the Blue Elephant, and so you decide to give it a try. And then you discover that the exterior absolutely does not give any impression of what the place is like on the inside.

Upon entering, you are immediately bombarded with a forest-jungle full of greenery, vegetation and flowers of all sorts. You cross a bridge over a small stream that flows throughout the restaurant, filled with what appear to be jumbo-size goldfish and other species. Before you are even seated, your eyes are darting left and right, trying to take in all of the scenery. And all of this artificially transplanted nature is done in a rather appealing and not-too-tacky manner. It felt bizarre to be sitting in the middle of such a scene, knowing that just back outside the entrance, the only jungle that remains is the concrete one. But for a while we can sit back and enjoy the escape. Very pleasant.

The restaurant seems quite big, but we don’t see it all, and in fact it cannot all be seen at once – completely contrary to our initial guess at what it might be like. There are many small rooms, mostly partitioned by greenery. I had the distinct impression that we had arrived under-dressed, as it seems that many of the patrons are there for one special occasion or another. One of the small rooms is fully occupied by a large birthday party. Another is full of what would appear to be couples on their first dates. Many of them dressed far too formally for a middle-of-the-week dinner. Some of the couples get up in the middle of dinner to come stand near the massive flower-pot near our table and get their own money shot to remember the night by. This is clearly a special place for a special night for many couples.

Right, so let’s make our night special too then. We start with some house cocktails. I go for the Thai Pina, and my companion goes for a Blue Cosmopolitan.

The cocktails are nice for pre-dinner, and certainly different from the originals they are based on, but I don’t think we could sip these all night. I did also note that the wine list was extensive, offering pretty much everything including a Sassicaia 2005 and even a Petrus ’95, and various others on their “Prestige List”. Not sure I would ever go for such a thing in a Thai restaurant, but it was interesting to note. Also, I took note of the place settings – cloth table-mats and gold/bronze silverware. So I’m just not sure what to make of this place now – the strip-mall exterior, the family style almost Rainforest Cafe-style interior, and the overly formal ambiance and wine menu. It’s all very confusing.

Now for appetisers, we went for the spring rolls and something called “Sarika”, which is a prawn and sweet corn cake. The prawn corn cakes in particular turned out to be very yummy, and were served with what I noted as fish sauce.

Our first selection for the main course was spicy sirloin stir fry with aubergine. This dish was really good, and really spicy. Different from the usual “red curry” dish, and the beef was tender and tasty.

Our second selection was the green chicken curry, of course the staple of any Thai restaurant. And although it was fine and edible, I think we agreed that it was not among the best green curries we had eaten. There was something about the curry sauce that just wasn’t quite right, as if it was too milky or creamy and not oily enough, or something like that – I have no idea what goes into a curry, but that was the impression.

Of course we ordered portions of both sticky rice and steamed jasmine rice, neither of which were particularly special for me.

For dessert we went for the trio “Kanom Thai”, which contains “Kanom Kluai” (banana pudding), “Ta-Ko” (rice flour, water chestnuts, and sweet coconut cream topping), and “Sodsai” (coconut milk and rice flour with caramelized coconut stuffing). Somewhat interesting and presentation was nice, as with all the dishes. But nothing here really stood out for us as something we had to come back for.

The final bill came a bit higher than what we were planning to spend, and I guess you are paying for a restaurant serving average Thai food at best, but dressed up as something more special. For about the same money I recall having a truly stunning dinner at Patara earlier this year, and although it is missing all of the forest scenery and confusingly formal pretense, the food there is far better and more memorable. So next time we are looking to do a nice Thai dinner on a loose budget, I think we’ll be back to Patara instead, and leave Blue Elephant for the Sunday brunch buffet, which looks like it could be the more interesting thing about this restaurant in hindsight.

Blue Elephant
4-6 Fulham Broadway
London
SW6 1AA
http://www.blueelephant.com
Phone: 02073856595

The original set of high-res photos is here.

French Toast

If there is any meal I would consider myself an expert in, it’s breakfast. We usually make a pretty big deal of breakfast on Saturdays and Sundays – either with a big breakfast cook-in, or whenever we’re not too lazy, a nice brunch outing. During the week of course I never find the time or inspiration to wake up early and whip up some blueberry pancakes, but I do usually have quite a large breakfast once I roll into the office every day. During the week it’s slightly more healthy – usually some low-fat croissants or some other reasonably healthy carbs, plus some fresh fruit, yoghurt, juice, etc. Breakfast is pretty much the biggest meal of the day for me, and it’s just always been that way.

One of my specialties that I love to break out when guests are over is my “American French Toast” recipe. Well, I thought this was pretty much an American thing, but according to the inter-nets, it’s also popular for breakfast in Europe and Bermuda (really? maybe in the American restaurants..); and is also a big dessert for Christmas time in Portugal and Brazil – I’ll have to double-check with my Brazilian friends on this… Interestingly, I have heard recently that it is a popular dish in Sweden called “Fattiga Riddare“, which means “Poor Knights”. Someone even went to the trouble to put together a full summary of international terms for this dish.

My recipe for French Toast is a simple combination of traditions passed down through the family, with a bit of my own invention. It varies quite a bit from the traditional recipe that I’ve seen all over the internet, which is very simple – basically just bread with eggs and milk, fried.

When I think of French Toast, other than some homemade versions that I remember from childhood, the one that really sticks out in my mind is from a restaurant in Dallas called Bread Winners. They are a combination bakery and restaurant, so they make their french toast with this amazing, freshly baked, triple-thickly sliced sourdough bread, and it is about the most delicious breakfast you can imagine.

So, my dream is to one day plan this out and find a bakery in advance that carries the same kind of fresh sourdough bread, and try my recipe out the right way – but unfortunately, breakfast turns out to generally be a spur of the moment dish for me, and is almost never well thought out or planned in advance. But if you don’t have any of that amazing fresh sourdough, we can make do with a typical loaf of sliced white bread – with a bit of effort, it will still be more than good enough to wow your hung-over or groggy-eyed guests in the morning!

So, let’s get started – first, mise en place with the ingredients:

Note: this quantity will feed 2 or 3 people, depending on how ravenous they are in the morning, and also on whether you put together accompanying dishes such as scrambled eggs, bacon, etc. – so just multiply the proportions to serve as many as you need.

6 pieces of bread – sliced white toast, fresh sourdough, or whatever you prefer.
3 eggs
A few teaspoons of melted butter
1/3 cup sugar
1/3 cup brown sugar
a couple of pinches of salt
a dash of cinnamon
about a half teaspoon of vanilla
a few tsp olive oil for frying
some milk (optional) – perhaps a few tablespoons?

So, we break the eggs into a bowl and whisk together with the vanilla, and also a pinch of salt and a pinch of sugar as well. Also add the milk if you are using it. This time around I left the milk out, which produces a slightly more “toasty” toast, while I guess milk renders the dish a bit more “wet”.

Now, before we can really continue we need to prepare the caramel. This is basically my secret mod on the traditional recipe – I like to sweeten the french toast with my own home-made caramel drizzled over the toast and cooked into it. So, I combine the butter, white sugar, and brown sugar together in a small pan over low heat.

I cook this mixture just long enough to get all of the ingredients to mix together and then sort of liquify into a thick caramel sauce. Be very careful not to burn this at all – as soon as it seems to be liquified enough to be drizzled thickly from a spoon, we can take it off the heat.

Now we can prepare the toast. Since I’m not using the soggy milk approach, I like to really let my toast soak in the eggs for a bit before cooking. We pour our egg mixture onto a flat plate so we can dip our toast into it.

We take each individual slice of toast, dip it into the egg and let it really soak up as much as possible.

Then we drizzle the caramel over the toast and spread it around a bit.

Repeat this on both sides of each piece of bread, and stack all of the bread on another plate, so that the egg mix that drips off the top pieces will just soak in to the pieces underneath.

Pour any leftover egg mix over the remaining toast, and try to get as much of it to soak in as possible. Also spread around any remaining Caramel, moving pieces of bread from the bottom that have already soaked up a lot, to the top of the stack. The idea here is to soak each piece with as much of the mix as possible, and to have a fairly even distribution of all of the ingredients.

Now we prepare the pan for frying the toast. We want to get the pan up to medium hot, so the egg will cook in to the toast relatively quickly. I also like to keep my oven on low heat and just throw the finished bits into the oven to stay warm until I’m ready to serve everything. For this frying, I find that even with a really good pan I need to use oil and not butter, as I tend to just start burning everything when I try to do it with butter, because it needs to be so hot. Anyways, it comes out very nice with oil, so keep it simple I guess.

Once you think the first side might be cooked a bit, go ahead and flip the toast. Be careful not to leave anything too long that it might burn, and if it does start to burn bring your heat down a bit.

It’s normal to get a bit of dark brown here because the caramel can get quite dark after cooking. As long as it’s not completely charred black you should be ok. I also like to go ahead and sprinkle with some cinnamon before sticking the cooked ones in the oven.

I would recommend to put your toast in the oven and prepare some accompaniments. I like to serve with a bit of scrambled eggs and also perhaps some nice smoked streaky bacon. Also a few pieces of fresh fruit can be a nice touch. And in this case I’m serving with a warmed up Bonne Maman cherry compote, in addition of course to the must-have Aunt Jemima’s maple syrup! A dusting of powdered confectioner’s sugar on top provides the final touch that makes this dish look like the real deal.

Although the explanation is detailed and lengthy, the actual preparation is pretty quick once you’ve had a practice run, and you can sneak out of bed and have this prepared before anyone else is awake, and they will rise to the delicious and tempting aromas calling them to the kitchen.

The high-quality photo album for this recipe can be viewed here.

Enjoy!