I was also really, really excited for Nanban to open ever since he featured and won on Masterchef. I went to Nanban last Friday but came out a little underwhelmed, I suppose. Everything felt a bit rushed, we were in and out within 40 minutes because the food came out literally minutes of ordering. To me it felt a bit confused - I’m okay with knowing when a place isn’t okay to linger, but when I booked a table they did tell me that there was a table turnaround time of 2 hours (I definitely couldn’t see myself staying for more than 1 hour!)
We had the crab rangoon age-gyoza, electric eel, and Brixton market salad to start. Interesting flavours of sweet & spicy dressing with fresh pineapples and aubergine in the salad, but seemed more like Indonesian/Malaysian rojak to me rather than anything Japanese-inspired. The eel didn’t taste anything more than smoked eel, and again couldn’t detect any Japanese influence (nor the sansho as advertised). The crab gyoza was the best of the starters, though the skins were a bit thicker than I would have liked. Great punchy yuzu dipping sauce.
For mains we had the Dead Ringer Chanpon and Mentaiko Pasta. The chanpon is a ramen dish with heavy Chinese influences, thick eggy noodles in a chicken & prawn broth with heaps of seafood and onsen tamago. The broth was really thick and quite salty, but tasty. Together with all the toppings, though, I think it was a bit too overwhelming, but maybe I just prefer simpler noodle dishes. The pasta was great, essentially spaghetti carbonara with mentaiko stirred through and topped with a lovely proper onsen tamago with wobbly whites that barely held together. It was also Very Rich and I couldn’t finish the massive portion - it really needed something sharp to cut through it.
The two of us were stuffed after that, and we’d probably return to try the rest of the menu (most likely the ramen), but still can’t shake off the feeling that I’d overhyped this restaurant a little too much!
