LDNReview
photo credit: Gavrill Papadiotis
Kym’s
This spot is Permanently Closed.
Included In
In pretty much every Bond film, there’s a scene in a restaurant. It’s full of raised eyebrows and innuendos, the overdressed and the underdressed, and, eventually, a stern conversation with someone who wants to hoover up the sea. Or something. Only a certain type of restaurant suits this Bond scene. Kym’s is almost one of them.
Kym’s is a Chinese restaurant in the City. Its aesthetic is cool and classy. Basically, they want you to picture James Bond here, at the bar, surveying the pink hued room. He’d probably be drinking a martini beneath the blossom tree, catching eyes with a maitre’d whose cheekbones are occasionally used to carve crispy pork belly. It’s that kind of place: fun and slick, but also a bit silly. And the food is exactly the same.
Some of the menu will read as familiar: spring roll, crispy duck, sweet and sour ribs, char sui pork. But a lot of things at Kym’s don’t come quite as you’d expect them. Take the frisbee-sized cracker (which is a rice one rather than prawn). This thing could be weaponised in the wrong hands. But in yours it will just get happily munched. Or you’ve got the crispy duck. It arrives, controversially, unshredded. It also arrives, delightfully, with a paintbrush for the plum sauce. A flourish which is so unnecessary, it suddenly seems necessary for anything involving sauce. Will we be applying ketchup with a mini roller to our burger buns from now on? We can neither confirm nor deny.
photo credit: Karolina Wiercigroch
There’s so much to like here. Banquet seating made for groups, shrine-worthy sweet and sour ribs, a plate of roasted meats you’ll want to drunk DM, a sweeping staircase that looks over the room so you can pretend to be James Bond. But there’s also so much to laugh at as well. An utterly pointless lattice shield that protects a completely average spring roll, a fake cherry blossom tree towering above the bar, and a room full of suits that Bond wouldn’t be seen dead in.
Sexy charm and little things aside, there are probably about five things on the menu that are truly noteworthy at Kym’s. Which means that although a lot of the food here is good, some of the unnecessary flourishes make the restaurant feel like a novelty once or twice a year job, rather than a regular. That said, price-wise, it’s decent for the City - £30 a head decent - without drinks. But once you’ve done it in a group, the £10 takeaway option is the best reason to keep coming back. It may not be the most James Bond move, but it’s the most sensible.
Food Rundown
Rice Cracker
photo credit: Karolina Wiercigroch
Silken Tofu with 100 Year Old Egg
Sichuan Aubergine
Spring Roll
photo credit: Karolina Wiercigroch
Sweet And Sour Pork Ribs
Prawn Skewer
photo credit: Karolina Wiercigroch
Three Treasures
photo credit: Karolina Wiercigroch
Crispy Duck
Lamb Burger
Pork And Shrimp ‘Bao Bao’
photo credit: Karolina Wiercigroch