111111LIMMIMERWIEW
Valley of the Kings
APART FROM the obvious sovereignty of northern Italian food in the fashion stakes, Thai food has ousted all others on the high street: it is the elegant oriental food, sud- denly making Chinese look heavy and coarse. But my money has always been on Lebanese food taking over as the trendy ethnic. It satisfies on the Mediterranean colour supp., healthy-living front and oper- ates as something of a bridge between European and Middle Eastern food.
Egyptian food does not, I rather think, stand much of a chance of ever setting a trend. Ali Baba, in Ivor Place, has always appealed to Egyptian expats, and I do not think the Valley of the Kings can expect a wider constituency. It is bang next door to the Cromwell Hospital, so no doubt is a comfort and lure for the families of Arab patients over here for a quick bypass or whatever. The name is not altogether an auspicious one. It is strange to call your restaurant after a burial place, and sadly prophetic, for it is as silent as the tomb. Only one other table was filled the night I was in.
From what I'd heard, I'd expected rather more kitsch Egyptiana, something along the lines of the Tut mania that raged in the late Twenties and early Thirties. I was all for going in Cleopatra drag, Liz-style. Luckily I didn't, for, apart from some papyrus hangings, navy ceiling with gold stars (now that Osborne & Little do their star-studded wallpaperings, hardly exotic) and a tinkling fountain in the smallest gar- den ever seen, the place is clinical rather than opulent in feel. The food is neither, but coarse and robust, food that you'd expect to eat outside, at people's homes, rather than in a restaurant. , Foul Medames, the essential Egyptian dish of beans, is so basic as to make any rumination ridiculous. It is one of those dishes, I feel, that you need to love for rea- sons other than greed — a memory from infancy, a holiday remembered fondly — in order to make it worth ordering. There are better beans, though, in the dish called taamia, which is the Egyptian version of falafel. They looked like things children bring home from school cookery classes, but opened to reveal their velvety, intense greenness: these broad-bean patties, soft within, sesame-sprinkled and crunchy with- out, were wonderfully infused with cumin and coriander and the breath of the East. White cheese salad and baba ghanoug, the Egyptian variant of the aubergine and tahi- ni purée, were coarser than they'd be in a Lebanese restaurant, but their flavours were true, their appeal strong.
I should, I know, have tried the molokhia, the soup of green leaves which is like a madeleine for any expat Egyptian, `It's a repeat of an earlier BBC strike.' but, lacking the nostalgic appetite, I am aware only of the sour slime. The ancient dish of Bessara, reputedly what the labour- ers working on the pyramids put away as they went about their business, is, I'm afraid, rather too reminiscent of a Pharaon- ic Ice-age Polyfilla. This is partly due to the fact that it has been kept in the fridge right up to the time of serving, so that cold has damped down its taste and solidified its tex- ture. Keeping food too cold is one of the most frequently encountered and signifi- cant flaws.
I have some sympathy for the chef here — a large and cheerful man, against the odds — since the lightness of customer traffic does convincingly argue against tak- ing food out to reach room temperature, even in optimistic readiness. But you can take things too far, as soon we will be obliged to: if certain ludicrous European Community health regulations are imple- mented, all stock-pots will be banished from the professional kitchen. If the French at Brussels or Strasbourg, or wher- ever these decisions are made, allow this to happen, then truly they should be consid- ered traitors to their tribe.
Ordering, as I did, so expansively from the list of starters is, I do think, a good idea, but it might not leave much room for a main course. Any Middle Eastern chef or housewife stakes her reputation on her kofta. Here the kofta mechweh, minced lamb kebabs, came as skewerless, sausage- shaped patties, redolent of all-spice and cinnamon and those Egyptian base-notes, roast cumin and coriander. I think there's a future for the great Egyptian banger.
Om Ali is probably the most famous of Egyptian puddings, and my favourite. This dish of filo pastry, baked, crumbled into pieces, sprinkled with nuts and raisins and covered in a bowl with milk and cream and sugar before baking, again is a wonderfully exotic variant of the English milk puds from the nursery. Mahalabia, a milk and cornflour blancmange of a paste, again sprinkled with pistachios, is more of an acquired taste; its texture at first may seem rather like wallpaper glue, but further mouthfuls begin to reveal its scented and floury creaminess. This, one imagines, is one of those rose-perfumed custards eaten in the Arabian Nights.
Egyptian food is neither as elegant nor as impressive as anything you'll find in a Lebanese restaurant, but it's good here, if not rhapsodic, and — who knows? — you might one day be taken with sudden hunger after doing a shop in Sainsbury's in the Cromwell Road and be pleased to know of it. Our dinner, for two, with lots of water and a couple of glasses or so of perfectly fine but undistinguished Lebanese rosé, came to just over £45.
Valley of the Kings, 162 Cromwell Road, London SW5; tel: 071-370 4282.
Nigella Lawson
Previous page
