Mambow to reopen in Peckham
Chef Abby Lee's Malaysian restaurant concept Mambow is reopening at Market Peckham next month after its Shoreditch launch was curtailed by the pandemic in 2020.
Mambow's head chef and founder Lee gained her diploma at Le Cordon Bleu in London, having grown up in her family's bakeries in Singapore and Malaysia before moving to Italy to cook at Michelin-starred Pashà Ristorante near Bari.
Nyonya dishes will feature throughout the menu, a cuisine which blends Chinese cooking ingredients and recipes with Indo-Malay flavours, herbs and spices.
For dinner, snacks will include the M wing, a brined and deep-fried chicken wing tossed in an anchovy sambal and served with lime, inspired by the flavours of Nasi Lemak, Malaysia's national dish. It will be served with Acar awak (pickled seasonal vegetables and pineapple, coriander seeds and crushed peanuts) and lor bak (deep-fried five-spice pork and prawn rolls in a bean curd skin). The menu will include three curries: gulai nangka, a mild yellow coconut curry with jackfruit; black pepper chicken curry, made with Sarawak black peppercorns; and ikan assam pedas, a Malay sour fish curry with okra, aubergine, sour tamarind and a spice mix of chilli, belacan, lemongrass and galangal.
There will also be kerabu glass noodles, a salad made of roasted and pounded desiccated coconut, shallots, vegan sambal, tofu puffs, beansprouts and limes. Kerabu pork belly is cured and grilled and served alongside cucumber, tomatoes, shallots, laksa leaf, mint, pounded dried shrimp and sambal belacan.
For dessert will be cendolis, a green shaved iced Malaysian dessert with layers of coconut milk, pandan jellies, red beans and palm sugar syrup.
The restaurant will also serve a regularly changing all-natural wine list designed by Les Caves de Pyrene, and Chang beer.
Lee's version of Nasi Lemak will be available for lunch with a choice of the three curries, as well as Hainanese chicken sando.
Mambow is set to open alongside rotisserie chicken, beers and cocktails concept Rotorious and a collection of small, independent shops. The restaurant will be on the ground floor of the market, which is already home to seven floors of co-workspace, Forza Wine's rooftop bar, Tonkotsu and Peckham Audio basement music venue.
The 1,750 sq ft space has been designed and developed by Market's sister company, Frame, with 60 covers in total. Mambow and Rotorious will each have their own space for seating with a communal dining area too.
