Khao Bird
The restaurant is situated on a busy Soho street, with sadly still some traffic around. It has more of a street-foodie-cafe vibe than a restaurant vibe. Which makes perfect sense in this neighbourhood.
As many contemporary restaurants now do, the dishes come "when they are ready". We ordered as our starters, some shan meat balls and a watermelon salad. The meatballs were made with chicken, and wrapped in caul fat. They were cola glazed and barbecued with crispy garlic and ginger. The flavours were very much new. The same can be said for the watermelon salad, which was pungent and spicy with a fish sauce caramel, with Thai basil.
For our mains, my wife chose the mutton fries: chips topped with a braised Burmese mutton curry, served with some sour cream and crispy leaves. It looked more like a starter than a main course, but it was oh so tasty. I picked a more traditional main in the form of the Hung-Ley pork curry. This was a delicious and tender curry with fish sauce and pineapple flavours. Some jasmine rice made sure that I could enjoy all the tasty curry juices too.
A bottle of Viognier complemented our meal well.
The flavours of the dishes at Khao Bird, although spicy, were novel and exciting. We easily could have selected a lot of more things from the menu. However, we were wise not to follow the suggestion of picking: two small, one medium, and two larger dishes. That would have been too much (we find this is often the case). The size of our selection was spot on, which means there is plenty to chose from on a return visit. It's also reasonably priced.
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