Abby Lee is standing at her kitchen island in Hackney, east London, chopping some long red chillis. “Don’t bother deseeding them,” she says, chucking the slices in a big silver bowl.
“They are quite mild, but we have dried chillis to provide the heat.” The Malaysian chef and founder of the open-kitchen concept Mambow in Peckham, south-east London, is demonstrating how to cook the sambal for her steamed okra and prawn floss dish (you can find the recipe below).
“It’s comforting,” she says, recalling how her auntie would have it ready and waiting for her after school. “It reminds me of home.” Today, home for Abby is a top-floor Victorian flat, which she shares with her partner, but growing up she divided her time between Malaysia and Singapore.
When she was younger, Abby would spend much of her spare time icing cakes at her family’s bakery in Singapore, but it wasn’t until later in life – returning to South-East Asia after a stint in the UK where she trained at Le Cordon Bleu – that Abby learned to really appreciate the food of her heritage.
In fact, the pandemic proved to be a particularly fruitful period, after her aunt passed down Abby’s grandmother’s recipes to her. Abby now credits both women as her greatest culinary inspirations.
It’s inheriting her family recipes that inspired Abby to open Mambow, which she runs from a permanent street-food-style set-up in a corner of Market Peckham. As its Instagram bio reads, Mambow specialises in “Malaysian heat and juicy wines”, with a menu featuring mussels tossed in a “lip-smacking sauce” of curry leaf, curd-bean paste and birds-eye chilli, which come dusted in dried-prawn floss, and fish-of-the-day ceviche bathed in a garlic and chilli paste with crispy coconut flakes and crunchy green mango.
The venture has a planet-friendly point of view too: Abby works with local suppliers to source her ingredients and uses any leftovers to make dishes such as soup or cake, while the space itself has been built using responsibly sourced materials. When it comes to her own kitchen at home in Hackney, Abby has employed a similar ethos.
With the help of her friend, the interior designer Leticia Houston, Abby transformed the formerly “beaten up” room into a pleasing pink-and-blue haven for cooking and hosting alike – all while being “as sustainable as we are at the restaurant”. She did this with materials such as old wood chips and recycled resin, using ex-display and second-hand objects to create a characterful scheme that packs a punch.
(As does, we can attest, her collection of spices and hot sauces). Watch our film now for a peek at her vibrant scheme and for her top cooking tips – and read on to discover her recipe for steamed okra with sambal and prawn floss.
