Kym's Candied Bacon Toast: Where Have You Been All Our Brunches?
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Last Updated 10 January 2020
The decor's expensively sleek at Kym's, the Bloomberg Arcade restaurant from Andrew Wong: glossy wood, pale marble and a cherry blossom installation — conservative luxe in muted colours.
It's the only thing that's muted about the Saturday brunch, a four-course job with bottomless drinks and a boozy, lavish, Wolf of Wall Street energy to the menu. Prices also lean towards the Wall Street wallet: £45 for the brunch, and £15 extra for bottomless drinking.
There's a fairly intense amount of food covered in that price, though: pickled snacks, starters (a few glorious variations on prawn toast), followed by a half lobster per person, side dishes (including a 'mini three treasures' three-meat extravaganza that's not remotely miniature), and yuzu cakes. A pre-food Bloody Mary shot's also included in the menu, though we're onto main courses before we realise ours never turned up — and too emotionally invested in the bottomless wine by that point to chase it up. That bottomless booze covers wine, beer, prosecco or bellinis, though you have to commit to one of those: no switching lanes.
So if you're in the market for a large amount of food and a decent amount of Square Mile-style swagger, this is ticking an awful lot of boxes.
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Absolute star of the brunch, oddly, isn't the lobster at all; it's the prawn toast. This is where the prevailing extra-ness of Kym's really works: sourdough, sesame-covered toast stuffed with a thick, meaty layer of prawn, a yolk embedded in the centre and a side of candied, crispy bacon or smoked salmon. One of the side dishes that comes with our lobster is also straightforward and excellent, a heap of crispy pork belly, soy chicken and Iberico char siu. No big surprises, just very good meat treated very, very tenderly.
After all that lightness of touch, the lobster comes as a shock. The poached soy half lobster's nice, a little rubbery in places, but mostly... just nice. The Roasted Typhoon-Shelter Style half lobster is a ferociously seasoned dish, everything so salted and fried it's difficult to taste much beyond that, or tell the difference between the lobster chunks and the bits of fried mushroom; sort of delicious but sort of punishing. You know it's intense when you're wolfing down big globs of soy-covered rice as a palate-cleanser.
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If your main interest in eating lobster is really, fundamentally, lobster, there are other lobster dishes in London which let the lobsteriness sing through more. If you're after a lavish extravaganza with a truly startling amount of food and an absolute game-changer of a prawn toast, Kym's has you covered.
Kym's Lobster Brunch, 19 Bloomberg Arcade, EC4N 8AR. Brunch at Kym's runs on Saturday from 12 pm - 3.30 pm, and is £45 a head with bottomless beer, wine or bellinis for £15.
