When you are old enough, you can measure your life in restaurants. I remember, for instance, when the Electric Diner on Portobello Road (named for a long ago and far away war) was a place to eat brunch, a meal that shouldn’t exist and doesn’t really, though if it belongs anywhere it belongs here. It was fine but glib – Notting Hill is either a place with no imagination or too much of it, I’m still not sure. How it can tolerate the truth of Grenfell Tower across the way I don’t know either, but I don’t live here.
The diner is gone, replaced by a Thai restaurant that is too interesting for Notting Hill
The diner is gone, replaced by a Thai restaurant – the Speedboat Bar, twin to a branch in Soho – that is almost too interesting for Notting Hill. Understand that Portobello is only a film set now, a fantasy and inoculation to reality. It is where tourists stare at a blue door from a film called Notting Hill. It isn’t even the real door. It’s a fake door to a fake world: perhaps Hugh Grant is Aslan, he has the hair. Even so, people come – usually from Canada – to see it. The Notting Hill Bookshop, which has a blue plaque naming it as the inspiration for the bookshop in the film, has a wall of love letters on a corkboard: ‘It was like a dream to enter the store after watching the movie’; ‘By the sheer phenomenon of the book-lined shelves [it’s a bookshop] and its affiliation to that charmed film, I might have fallen a little bit in love’. Notting Hill has not recovered from the reflection it found in Richard Curtis’s mirror. Now it thinks itself fiction and has fallen to romcom, of all genres. Heartbreak and binge-eating are big here: I can feel it and I would know. You can buy a biscuit tableau of idealised central London from an insufferable bakery for a fortune, and you will still be you. Paddington Bear is king in this parish. Doughnut shops abound.
Now comes the Speedboat Bar, shaped like a train carriage with an open kitchen and monochrome floors, but floral: a hangover from the diner. The walls are pale marble – again, this feels assembled from other restaurant parts, a Franken-restaurant, and pleasing – and hung with photographs of normal Thai restaurants across the world. As if it is lonely among the doughnuts and the biscuit triptychs – and who wouldn’t be, because who communicates in biscuit? There is a games room at the back for the immature, and it all feels brighter than it really is: as if it bathes in neon for solace. The menu is simple, for a lovechild of the 1960s, written in bubble font: snacks; salads; stir fries; specials; curries. They are southern Thai, plus Chinatown in Thailand, as brightly lit and gaudy as the Speedboat Bar itself, cooked by British chefs who love Thailand, and make this frenzied version of it for the congenitally numb of west London. The chicken skins with zaep seasoning are a punch with salt, and we cannot eat them. The sweetcorn fritters are better, and immense; the crispy pork with prik nam som sauce is adequate, if cool to the touch; the minced beef with holy basil is fiercer than usual, and lovely; the cellophane noodles with chicken are dull but fine.
Even so, I like this place, because it is savage and alive, like Croydon, and something of a counter-Reformation in romcom land, which prefers to live on doughnuts and fantasies because reality is too frightening. If you don’t agree, look across the way.
Speedboat Bar, 191 Portobello Road, London W11; tel: 020 7908 9696.
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