Singburi, London: ‘A suburban institution is reborn in Shoreditch’

Photographs Sophia Evans

Singburi, Singburi, Singburi. The original restaurant was a suburban institution, the reason people went to Leytonstone before Leytonstone was even Leytonstone (in the past maybe eight years Leytonstone has become London’s sole place to move out to when you’re 35 and have one interestingly named baby and “need a bit more room”) and was also the original restaurant for a generation of London’s foodies: a family run, elbows and knees BYOB joint with a queue outside and a joyful chaos inside, with a blackboard menu that was often vaunted as the best in London. The first iteration of Singburi is where a lot of people who now dedicate their Instagram feed to photos of their dinner had the first mouthful of something that made them go, “Hold on, food can do that?” As a result the place is whispered about like a fallen warrior might be in the times before bronze. Londoners are no longer split into “north of the river or south?”, they are split by whether they made it to the Leytonstone Singburi, or if they’re only ever destined to go to the new, shiny, Shoreditch one.

So here we are. It’s novel that Singburi is now an actual restaurant that functions like a restaurant and not a sort of impossible to book, turn up and eat there clown car, but in that transformation some of the magic has gone. The new restaurant gleams and glimmers and has windows that an architect has thought about, and lives comfortably on the hallowed list of London’s modern fun/spicy/Thai restaurants (Kiln, Smoking Goat, Speedboat Bar), and that’s all a good thing. When the original Singburi announced a sabbatical in 2024 I experienced anguish. When they announced a new version of the restaurant opening in 2025, I was like, “Oh OK. Fine. I can go and get a chicken thigh then”.

It is still fairly difficult to actually get a seat, improbably, and chancing a walk-in on what I consider a fairly sleepy Tuesday lunchtime, there are no tables available. I am placed at the counter with Nilu, my smallest and most evil friend, and we get to watch as a line of chefs work the tao burners. (If you can stand to sit at, frankly, a fairly uncomfortable counter, I would recommend doing so: at Singburi they seem to cook everything on maximum flame, in a way that’s sort of like watching a guitarist hit a really sick riff).

Since opening in June, Singburi 2.0 has done a lot of what made the original restaurant so great (profound spice, a BYO-friendly policy, absolutely no desserts), but in the move has traded neighbourhood bustle for 2025 anodyne: it’s a lot of very modern-feeling grey concrete and really tall bathroom doors and there isn’t anywhere to put your coat for some reason and you can see all the pipes. (The restaurant’s design statement says: “The ceiling – an exposed weave of circular steel beams and metal-deck flooring – celebrates the raw honesty of the architecture.” Didn’t want to do the ceiling, did you!) But give them some time to live in the place and acquire its own personality. This is my second visit to the new site and the food got better along the way. I’m sure someone will get a set of coat hooks up over the next 12 months.

There’s a lot of pedigree on the plate, then: Singburi’s original owners handed the head chef-proprietor reins over to their son, Sirichai Kularbwong, who teamed up with two friends – Kiln founding chef Nick Molyviatis and Catalyst’s (home of the best hot sauce you can buy in London) Alexander Gkikas – to sympathetically bring the spirit of the old restaurant six postcodes over. First out is the chicken thigh, a menu staple that I inhale, today’s version being so loaded with grated ginger it’s like the thing has fur (complimentary). Cubes of lamb riblet in a sticky, savoury and spicy sauce have me making notes riddled with typos into my phone – “lamb is stupid -perfect: not to Meaty, spice level EXEPTIOANL”, apparently – and already the Thai approach to chilli is putting a smile on my face: heavy heat that slightly makes you giddy and euphoric (“I sort of feel high,” I tell the waitress, which I think is a sentence I said word-for-word on this exact spot in Shoreditch, just 10 years earlier) without invoking agony, always tempered with something sour or sweet or tangy or just fresh and herby and green.

Despite being evil, Nilu is, as it turns out, a complete spice coward, so more for me. I get an entire bowl of ox cheek gaeng om to myself – unctuous beef in a coconutty broth/gravy with the chilli standing out like an exclamation mark emoji, tempered down perfectly with just a whole bowl (all right: two whole bowls) of jasmine rice. I am not really a person who enjoys tomatoes – and yes it does always makes me feel like a fussy baby admitting this – but the smoked tomato salad turns my brain upside down: fresh green-tasting tomatoes with an almost apple-like bite, adroitly smoked and quartered, served with a vibrant handful of peanuts, lime, coriander and fish sauce – just throw that combo on anything, honestly – and I can’t even really make out what I was getting at about them in my notes, because I was typing so joyfully with my thumbs. The aubergine pad phet was singing: a just-together sticky-wobbly texture, Thai basil poking through, my highlight of the meal. I leave like my brain’s just had its own sauna and with a very wide grin. The magic of Singburi is still there, it’s just – much like Shoreditch – become something cleaner and sleeker and less giddily fun.

Singburi, Unit 7, Montacute Yards, 185‑186 Shoreditch High Street, London E1 6HU (singburi.london). Small plates from £6.50, mains from £12.50, wine from £33