Talking about London’s north-south divide is boring. Yes, I’m aware I’m doing it now. We’re all territorial creatures of habit who moan about schlepping more than a two-mile radius from our homes. As a diehard east Londoner, there’s only a handful of things that would lure me south of the river: Uncle Wrinkle Chinese takeaway, Skehan’s pub, and now, Lai Rai’s prawn lollipops.
Lai Rai is the newish Vietnamese spot that’s been lighting up Peckham’s Rye Lane like a giant red lantern since June. With its stripey red-and-white awning, glowing neon interiors and hawker-style clatter, it’s fun and unconventional – not your typical pho or banh mi joint. By day, it serves banh mi and strong Vietnamese coffee; by night, it channels the spirit of bia hoi – the roadside beer stalls of Hanoi, where people come together for drinks and snacks.
The menu is by Blair Nguyen, co-founder of Vinaxoa, a London-based contemporary Viet snacks collective, and AP Nguyen, visual artist and head of operations at Lai Rai. It draws on their Hanoi childhoods of dessert runs with parents, after-school snacks and post-rave 4am munchies, reimagining Vietnamese classics with playful, experimental twists. There’s jellyfish papaya salad, grilled pork neck skewers, and a dangerously good tequila and mango cocktail, but the dish that really has my brain whirring in disbelief is the prawn lollies.
Named chao com, they hail from Hue, the old imperial city on Vietnam’s central coast, and here they’ve undergone some kind of sorcery. “It’s a prawn paste with young green rice that puffs up when cooked, wrapped around sugar cane and deep fried,” Nguyen tells Broadsheet. “We serve it on a gingery satay peanut sauce with a dab of our green herb sauce.”
What lands on the table is a work of art: two deep-fried, golden orbs of juicy prawn coated in delicate, crispy rice flakes, each dramatically skewered with slender sugarcane handles. Bite through the crisp shell and you reach a soft, bouncy prawn filling enriched with pork fat and balanced by a hit of sweetness from the sugarcane. Drag it through the creamy peanut and nuoc cham satay sauce, and swirl it in the bright, herby Vietnamese green sauce, and you get a textural riot that hits every note: crunchy, nutty, juicy, fragrant, tangy and sweet.
What I love most is how interactive it is. Eating with your hands feels a little primal, tastier even, but gnawing and sucking on mini sugarcane sticks instantly takes me back to sweltering summers in Hong Kong, visiting extended family and chomping through cane after cane like a hungry beaver.
And honestly? I’d run or swim across that river again tomorrow just to have another round.
I Can’t Stop Thinking About is a series about dishes Broadsheet editors and contributors are obsessed with.
