Restaurant Friday: Thai Heaven at 'Isarn', London

by - Thursday, April 10, 2014



This time I don’t have any stories or anecdotes to tell. Just, that I really like Thai food, and London just seems to be the right place for this. Also, I like Angel a lot, the part of London where ‘Isarn’ is located. It has great places to chill, eat and to walk around.


Type of Place: The restaurant is made up of one long rectangle room with a lot of flowers and reddish dimmed light. Nice lamps and fancy chairs covered with cow patterned fabric make the interior very nice and chic. Waiters are very attentive and ask for your well-being from time to time, but not pushy at all. Be sure to book in advance, because when I was there really a lot of people entered and kept asking for a table, but nothing was free - maybe that’s because it was on a weekend.





Food: The food is great, served on decent tableware and well spiced. I was especially pleased by the desert, but I will come to that later.
Our starters were crispy duck and pomelo served in a betel leaf and chargrilled pork ribs with garlic and pepper, which I liked both a lot. The fresh pomelo in combination with the crispy duck were a perfect combo. The ribs were very well flavoured and marinated in some lovely spices, which I could not all identify. For the main course I’d recommend the roasted duck red curry with rice as a side. It was a very rich Curry, with some vegetables and delicious pieces of roasted duck. Also, I am a fan of water chestnuts, so I was happy they found their way into the Curry, too. I would not order the chargrilled lamb chop with kafir lime leaf and red curry again, I guess. The portion was really small (ok, that’s normally the case with lamb chops, but still), the meat was good but a bit fatty and I was missing a bit the intense taste of spices. 

So now I come to the most important part of every dinner – dessert. It sounded great on the menu and tasted even nicer. It was sticky black rice cooked in coconut milk with mango slices and even though we shared (and I HATE sharing dessert – jealous, jealous me) the portion was perfect and I was absolutely happy.

To wrap it up: all was really good, especially the starter and the dessert. Red Curry with duck was very tasty too, the lamb chops were ok, but the portion was a bit small. Checkout their food menu here.

Prices: For London proportions prices are good. Main courses maybe a bit overpriced as to value/quantity, but maybe that’s just me. For 2 starters, 2 mains, dessert (I do not remember which drinks we had) we paid around 45£.


Location: 119 Upper Street, London N1 1QP







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