TA TA Eatery: Go with the grain

Food’s new power couple were paired up by Nuno Mendes. Now they’re cooking up a rice revolution, says Frankie McCoy 
Bowled over: Zijun Meng and Ana Gonçalves met via Nuno Mendes’s The Loft Project
Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures
Frankie McCoy8 June 2016

What’s the most romantic food you can think of? Spaghetti Bolognese, slurped à la Lady and the Tramp? Oysters? The last Rolo? A bowl of rice isn’t what springs to mind. That’s unless you’re Zijun Meng and Ana Gonçalves, the chef power couple who met through Nuno Mendes. Their concept, TA TA Eatery, started out as a street food stall and has just found a permanent home at the Curio Cabal café in Haggerston.

“We want to create a family feel, with lots of things shared round the table,” says Meng. “But obviously the techniques we’ve learned in restaurant kitchens means it’s a little more advanced than normal home-cooking.” In practise, that means sweet rice cream sundaes and prawn tartare with caviar and egg yolk.

Meng and Gonçalves have been championed by Mendes, who heads both the kitchen at Marylebone celeb hangout Chiltern Firehouse (where a starstruck Gonçalves once begged Meng to cook something special for vegan Woody Harrelson) and Portuguese joint Taberna de Mercado in Spitalfields.

Mendes is known as a hot chef but he also has a sideline in matchmaking. Both Chinese-born Meng, and Gonçalves, who is Portuguese, started their culinary careers at The Loft Project, Mendes’s pop-up restaurant in his own flat, in 2009. It might well have been called the Bedroom Project, given the number of romances that begun there. There’s even a Loft Project baby.

Rice and shine: fish dishes at TA TA

The couple stayed with Mendes when he opened his Michelin-starred, no-menu molecular gastronomy joint Viajante, and followed him to the Firehouse when Viajante closed in 2012. They didn’t get together until Meng left the Firehouse for another job. When that fell through, it seemed like fate that they should unite professionally and romantically: TA TA was conceived shortly after they started going out.

Mendes also played Cupid when it came to finding them their gig at Curio Cabal, which happens to be the chef’s local. TA TA’s first permanent home is in a Haggerston café-cum-workspace, heaving with maca avocado smoothies, single-origin aeropress coffee on rotation and round-spectacled MacBook-tapping customers. When Mendes heard the owners wanted to expand into evening dining, he proposed Meng and Gonçalves.

TA TA means “he and she” but Gonçalves insists they aren’t soppy. The photographer’s suggestion that they feed each other with chopsticks is met with protests: “Such a Chinese cliche!”

No longer street food: TA TA offer a kind of high-end Chinese tapas, with the odd Portuguese influence

Meng and Gonçalves started TA TA as a street food stall at Druid St Market and Dalston Yard, where their “ricewichs” and Korean chicken wings gained a cult following. A sold-out pop-up at the Newman Arms followed, now they’re moving back into an indoor kitchen.

At a time when London’s street food scene is booming and summer teases us with the promise of eating al fresco, such a retreat indoors bucks trends. Gonçalves shrugs. “At the time we were into street food and thought we could bring something cool to it — we did. But the food we do now isn’t suitable for street food. This is more our style.”

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For now, TA TA’s food at Curio is a sort of high-end Chinese tapas, with the odd Portuguese influence: braised peanuts with celery that would convince even the most stringent stalk-hater; tofu that not only actually tastes of something but is intensely umami, thanks to a generous sprinkling of katsuobushi (dried fish flakes); meaty wild mushrooms with smoked egg. The braised aubergine is impossible to eat with chopsticks. Even Meng can’t do it.

What really matters is the rice. Meng eulogises over the “emotional” grain, a staple part of his upbringing in Tsingtao. At TA TA, it pops up in their take on a spring roll, a parcel filled with shiitake mushrooms, and herbed chicken skin congee, while dessert is a “ricecream” sundae: starchy, creamy balls, like frozen, blended Ambrosia.

Piles of steaming, short-grain rice accompany everything. It acts as a side plate which soaks up the flavours of all the other fishy, saucy, sticky dishes on the table. Nuno Mendes should book a table now.

CURIO + TA TA opens on June 16, curioandtata.co.uk

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