A delicacy is not really a true delicacy at all unless it involves something patently disgusting. At Champor-Champor, they serve pan-fried duck breast coated in kopi luak. Kopi luak are coffee beans that have been excreted from the arse of an Asian palm civet. This is a creature that looks a bit like Davina McCall: all bright-eyed and sweet-pelted, neat little claws and pointy ears. It hangs around the fruit trees of Java eating coffee beans and, every so often, taking a dump. At which point, the steaming mound is descended upon by eager Indonesian entrepreneurs with rustic pooper-scoopers. Later, they pick the beans out of the ordure and send them off to decadent western countries, where they retail at about £500 for 500g. Nice work if you can get it.
You can buy gift boxes of this stuff online. They even send you a small chunk of authentic faecal matter — presumably for ornamental purposes. The digestive process of the palm civet extracts the bitterness from the coffee beans, apparently.
The kopi luak sauce at Champor-Champor was quite delicious, once you’d forgotten that it had emanated from an overgrown weasel’s bottom: subtly sweet and smoky, a perfect riposte to the old canard that a silk purse cannot be fashioned from a sow’s ear. Or, in this case, from weasel shit. It really can.
Malay cuisine is, in general, a bit of a sow’s ear, if we’re being honest. Maritime Southeast Asia does not really punch its gastronomic weight when put up against those grand old neighbours to the north, China, Thailand and Japan. There are one or two dishes from Malaysia and Indonesia that you might linger over happily for a while — the thick, sticky rendang curry, for example, or the scorching sambal sauce. And there’s the ancient nyonya cuisine, I suppose — bits of fish baked in leaves by impecunious peasants and stuff like that. But, by and large, if you’re in that neck of the woods, you head for the Chinese restaurants. Not least because they serve alcohol.
And so Champor-Champor stretches the boundaries, and does so with quite magnificent imagination and execution. I’ve spent a fair bit of time in Malaysia, and do not recognise duck, venison, plantain, wild pepper, basil or mushrooms as regular fixtures on the menus of Kuching or Ipoh or Kuala Lumpur, still less a fine and crisp Hungarian Tokaj wine. But hell, who wants authenticity? Harry Ramsden’s is pretty authentic, and where does that get you? Four of us ate a superb meal at Champor-Champor for about £200 and the quality of cooking was as high as anything you will find for about triple the price in the West End, given the most un-Malaysian amount of alcohol we consumed. And we did so in an interesting place — rich Malay colours, greenery, low lights — with a warm atmosphere, where there was plenty to look at, instead of the scrubbed, corporate, soulless expanses of W1, where the diners seem perpetually intimidated by their surroundings and the waiters have the air of sulky death-row warders.
My baby squid stuffed with rice came with a crunchy and sharp guava salad, to which star anise had at some point been introduced and then sent packing. My friend, who works in health and safety, and so had probably made a mental note of all the fire exits and whether or not they were adequately identified as such, went for the baked eel, which was succulent and devoid of the oil slick that is so often its unwanted companion.
The girls, being girls, both chose the vegetarian option and looked requisitely self-righteous for having done so, sipping their endless bloody bottles of water, virtue made flesh. They simply adored their baked plantain accompanied by a sweet satay dip and steamed okra in sambal sauce. This is a fusion restaurant, and so the edges have been rounded off. I have had prawn sambal in Malaysia so hot it made my gums bleed and my scalp itch. But only Indian (or Bangladeshi) restaurants are allowed to inflict physical pain on us through the uncompromisingly vicious nature of their dishes these days, so the sambal was a mild-mannered, polite and well-spoken sort of dish — more David Cameron than Norman Tebbit. Frankly, I could have done with a bit of unequivocal Tebbitry, but the girls were relieved. Too much chilli is thought of as a bit uncouth, isn’t it? And a bit de trop. Similarly, the water buffalo rendang disdained its opportunity to scorch the hell out of our palates, but it was properly moist and fragrant with galangal root and coconut — tender and perfectly delectable.
Then there was my pan-fried duck. Duck in reconstituted weasel droppings. The meat was crisp on the outside and pink in the middle, with the weasel crap smeared attractively around the edges. It came with a crisp salad and a soy-based dip. If you’re going to eat the excrement of a medium-sized mammal, this is the way to do it. The women, meanwhile, spent the entire evening in competition to see who could be the more irritatingly pious: gallons of iced water, vegetarian crispy pancakes with wild mushrooms, and other green stuff that doesn’t scream when you kill it. I hope they know they’re fooling nobody, least of all God, with all this conspicuous abstinence and perpetually deferred gratification. He knows what they are like. He is watching them, from a distance.
The desserts were exquisite. You may be getting sick of stupid ice-cream flavours by now. Bacon and egg, Heston, mate? Vanilla and haddock, anyone? Weasel poo? But the smoked banana that accompanied a rich, if ever so slightly too dry, chocolate cake succeeded in being both novel and charming. I had a selection of Malaysian sweets that veered dangerously close to authenticity, at least in inspiration if not in execution. They were good.
When we arrived, the waiters looked as if they were sort of quite pleased to see us. It made such a pleasant change. I realise that if I brought a bunch of friends around to your house for dinner, you’d look depressed and maybe start clawing at your wrist and exhaling loudly after an hour or so. But at Champor-Champor, they made a real effort to be welcoming, and gave us interesting snacks made from the skin of tofu, and strangely moreish fruit breads.
There are few decent restaurants down my manor, southeast London. The faux-Polish Baltic is one, and on a good day, Arancia, a Bermondsey Italian, is too. But, a bit like Malaysia, we don’t really punch our weight in this half-forgotten quadrant. Champor-Champor is a rather wonderful exception.
Champor-Champor
62-64 Weston Street, SE1; 020 7403 4600
Dinner: 6.15pm-10.15pm; lunch by group appointment. Closed Sundays
