Bamboo Mat is a nikkei style restaurant serving their Japanese- Peruvian cuisine in two locations, Stratford and Canary Wharf. The owners are ex-Chotto Matte, possibly London’s leading Nikkei restaurant, Roka, and Sushi Samba. So they have the pedigree and understanding of what is needed to marry the precision of Japanese cooking with the punch of South American flavours. I visited the Canary Wharf branch of Bamboo Mat with high expectations as my guest and I were both fans of Japanese and nikkei food. Now I don’t know about you but I usually get lost when visiting Canary Wharf. Whether it’s taking a wrong turn when emerging from the station and wandering through the endless nuclear bunker shopping mall tunnels or the Lego glass and steel streetscape. Fortunately if you’re not a Canary Wharf denizen or a regular visitor getting to Bamboo Mat’s location on Wood Wharf is an easy stroll from the Canary Wharf station without a satnav; or a boy scout with an ordinance survey map and a compass.
Bamboo Mat sits in the Wood Wharf zone between one of the many modernist towers in an area of mostly apartments peppered with ground floor restaurants and bars. You enter into an high ceilinged but comfortable room with wooden venetian blinds in many of the floor to ceiling windows. This use of timber adds warmth to the modern rectangular space. The same theme is carried onto the first floor dining area which is dominated by the large open kitchen. Throughout, elements of the design and materials used echo Peruvian culture and heritage. The central bar was designed with the outline and roof canopy of a traditional rural Peruvian house. The extraordinary carved highbacked chairs at the bar’s counter were specially created by artisans in Peru and are another indigenous nod.
Cables of vertical rope descend in some of the windows symbolising the mountain gorge spanning pre-Columbian rope bridges, in particular the bridge at Q’iswa Chaka spanning the Apurimac river which has been in continual use for over 500 years (thank you Wikipedia). Clearly a considerable amount of thought and care has gone into the design of the restaurant.
A friendly welcome and we were seated at a corner table with a good view of our fellow diners. It was encouraging to see how busy the restaurant was on a sodden Tuesday evening. The menu spans the range of nikkei from sushi to the more heavily Peruvian influenced dishes. We chose to mostly lean towards the more Peruvian rather than traditional Japanese offerings such as the sushi, though looking at the busy chopsticks at neighbouring tables other diners clearly enjoying their nigiri and sashimi, so perhaps we missed out. To start the proceedings we opted for cocktails. There was a good selection to choose from on the cocktail menu. One pisco sour and one spicy margarita later and we were ready to eat. To begin we shared the very good ‘ceviche deluxe’. A generous bowl of marinated white fish, seafood, giant corn kernels, tiger’s milk and nuts – all with a good hit of lime in the marinade. So plenty of flavour if not quite the decorative elegance of the ceviche at for instance Lima in Covent Garden. However, I did wonder whether to email the management to consider renaming the dish to something more nikkei than ‘deluxe’ as the last time I saw the word used was in Lidl.
The pork belly with anticucho was devoured with gusto, delicious cubes of meat with two colours of anticucho, chimichurri and a hint of mint provided by the huacatay sauce (huacatay is Andean ‘black mint’ – although it’s green and purple). Then a prettily presented bamboo maki with an acevichada sauce giving each mouthful a nice acidity and bamboo shoots liberally spread through the centre making for a satisfying crunch with each bite. For our main courses the chicken anticucho was worth ordering, being flavoursome and moist; though the overly flavoured salsa verde mash it came with was rather controversial at our table. The ox cheek and mash was a great success, with beautifully soft meat and a wonderful yuzu gravy for which the silky mashed potato was the perfect accompaniment. It was one of those dishes which stays in the memory and would make for a Sunday lunch showstopper if served at home to friends.
Where Bamboo Mat succeeds is with the quality of the cooking and the interesting nikkei flavours. It is a style of cooking that is designed to excite and to comfort at the same time. There are enough menu choices which should suit most people whether they prefer to stick to more familiar sushi (with some Peruvian adaptations), or wish to lean into the more Peruvian adaptations of the mostly recognisable Japanese dishes which make up Nikkei cuisine. The wine list has some good value wines by the glass and bottle too. So if you enjoy Japanese food and are unfamiliar with nikkei then why not try Bamboo Mat, and if nikkei is already your thing add it to your restaurant list as it’s a welcome, sociable and enjoyable dining option for Canary Wharf – it’s a very easy restaurant to like.
THE INFORMATION
Bamboo Mat Canary Wharf, 1 North Lane, Canary Wharf, London, E14
+44 20 3355 1957 – [email protected] – https://www.bamboo-mat.co.uk
Open Daily · Mon–Sun, 11:00 AM – 10:00 PM
