MADAME D

Madame.D

Seats in the dining den can be booked for the first sitting, at 6pm Tuesday to Saturday.

The seats at the bar on the ground floor are operated on a walk-in basis.

http://www.madame-d.com

Madame.D

Seats in the dining den can be booked for the first sitting, at 6pm Tuesday to Saturday.

The seats at the bar on the ground floor are operated on a walk-in basis.

Madame D review – Gunpowder spin-off tries to scale new heights ...

Madame D isn’t an overflow space or a second branch of Gunpowder, but a different beast entirely serving a small ‘Himalayan’ menu – a mix of Nepali, Tibetan and Indo-Chinese dishes.

It’s a somewhat odd mix, but hardly unknown in London – the southeast of the city has been home to a large-ish gaggle of Tibetan and Nepali restaurants, such as Woolwich’s Kailash Momo, for years.

Madame D’s egg noodles, while not exemplary, were better – they avoided the trap of being excessively thick, stodgy and greasy like much of the nation’s take-aways.

Minced lamb and spring onions, along with another appearance of the one-note spicy sauce, was mixed into the noodles.

A mountainous helping of hearty potato and chopped noodle bits came doused in a fruity sweet sauce that had regular intermissions of tart sourness.

Madame D's | A Himalayan Restaurant In Spitalfields - London ...

It comes to us courtesy of the husband/wife team behind Gunpowder (which recently won a Bib Gourmand from Michelin for its Indian food) and echos the ramshackle back-rooms that once littered the Commercial Street rag route, thanks to deep red awnings, smoky candlelight, distressed walls, high ceilings, and long industrial-feel communal treble tables.

And on those tables you’ll find, THE FOOD The Himalayas, for those not in the loop, are big.

Meaning that the national cuisines that Himalayan food tends to draw from spans everything from Indian, to Nepalese, to Tibetan, and Chinese.

Well, Madame D’s has enlisted their help (sort of like a booze sherpa, if you will) to round out the drinks menu with pints of craft beer, and margs made with spices from the kitchen.

Madame D’s | Second Floor, 76 Commercial Street, E1 6LY If you like the sound of this place …you should check out Gunpowder.

Madame D restaurant review | Culture Whisper

Set over two floors, with communal tables tightly packed, Madame D is already attracting a crowd.

As ever with sharing plates, it’s the kind of menu that’s best enjoyed as larger group.

Prawn crackers are no mere nibble – as you’d hope at £8.50 a portion.

A cool, yoghurty dip would have made a nice addition and those who plan to order them for grazing purposes while deciding on the rest of the menu, beware: the heat can numb your taste buds.

Other highlights include the tangy hakka chili paneer and the oh-so moreish crispy potato and noodle bhel.

Madame D's: Exhilarating food from the Himalayas | London ...

There are so many flavours at play in the restaurant’s quite deliberately ramshackle looking space — including rough textured walls coloured as if the paint pre-dates the smoking ban — that it's hard to know where to start describing it.

What this means on the plate is a style of Chinese food that somewhat resembles Sichuan cooking, but without as much chilli or numbing heat.

There are dumplings like you might have tried at Camberwell’s northern Chinese restaurant Silk Road, but also versions of bhel puri and paneer which have their roots firmly in India.

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Madame D, London E1: 'Consider every fibre of my palate fully ...

Of being the output of some kind of ideas incubator team feverishly poring over a list of recent London successes – the one where they cook northern Thai food over fire, the one where they put duck in doughnuts, the one where the pizza is made with seawater, the one where all the food is ball-shaped – in search of something to tumesce the tastebuds of a jaded capital, something that hasn’t already been done.

As are naga chilly (sic) beef puffs, like the most addictive liaison between Chinese cooking (those dim sum stalwarts of buttery short pastry stuffed with jammy char siu) and the full-on spicing of the Indian subcontinent.

I rarely order paneer because it usually leaves me tofu-cold, but Madame D’s Sino-Indian “Hakka” version, made from buffalo milk, is fried into taut, creamy cubes and bathed in a magnificently garlicky, sweet chilli sauce with peppers and onions, something that haunts me (and everyone around me) for days afterwards.

(The cramped, knick-knacky little space is very noisy; it’s apparently modelled on the sitting room of the fictional Madame D.) But it’s not often I come out of a restaurant and immediately want to go back to eat the rest of the shortish menu.

So I’ve no idea whether or not the food at Madame D is particularly authentic, nor do I care.

Madame D | Restaurants in Spitalfields, London

This is pretty much everyone’s first question when I tell them about Madame D.

There’s the crunch of nuts, the hum of spring onions.

There’s sweet and heat and meat and oh so much butter.

It’s a small room above an east London pub (on busy nights, it also takes over the downstairs bar).

For atmosphere and small plates that break the mould, yet are somehow still familiar, pay Madame D a call.