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The Filipino-Bengali chef at newly opened Guanabana – a Spanish word for the Mexican sour sop fruit – serves up a menu of Mexico-Caribbean-Argentino-Colombian dishes, many adorned with a sprig, sauce or green detail from the Mediterranean. Just to further confuse matters, you can order sides of Thai jasmine rice, roti, or dabs of tartare sauce. Such wanton fusioneering shouldn’t work but it does here, oddly enough.
Two great starters include oven-baked red jalapeños stuffed with cream cheese, and cassava chips with tomato salsa. The former has a kick – though the cooking seems to take out the bud-assailing sharpness of the chilli – while the cassava is dry but sweetly flavoursome. A let-down was a plate of crevettes, which were mushy – overcooked or simply not fresh – and blandly unfishy on the palate.
Mains invited us to go in any direction we pleased, so we opted for two Jamaican dishes. The ackee and salt fish, with rice and peas, was abundant and wonderfully varied in taste and texture. The ackee was creamy and delicately sweet, the fish salty and slightly bitter, and extremely fresh. Another fish main of pan-fried bass was a tower of succulent, subtly seasoned fillets separated by layers of crisp greens and a delicious feta mash. On a trip downstairs to the stylish designer loos I collided with a powerful blast of garlic from the kitchen. Both the mains were lavishly laced with the allium, but not so much that it dominated the coconut milk, onions and herbs that give the cuisine its distinctive Jamaican character. If you’re extremely hungry, there are four great salads on offer, including a mean jerk-chicken and parmesan affair (good to try with the house jerk sauce – the litmus test of any self-respecting Caribbean menu) and a halloumi and avocado creation that was sprinkled with Argentinian chimichurri sauce.
Excellent sorbets, meringues and strong coffee – which we took out to enjoy in the lovely bamboo-ceilinged garden-cum-terrace – completed a globetrottingly diverse but well-crafted dinner. Kentish Town is rather short on decent Latin American or West Indian eateries, and Guanabana has filled several gaps with its energy and creativity.
Time Out Issue 1977: July 10-16 | Click here to view original article |