El Ta’koy review, Hawaiian restaurant, London, 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden

El Ta’koy serves Hawaiian-inspired street food and Tiki cocktails

published 3 March 2023

When I suggested to friends that we try a Hawaiian restaurant for a midweek catch up in central London, there were the inevitable remarks about “pineapple on pizza”. Incidentally the Hawaiian pizza doesn’t even come from Hawaii, it was invented in Canada by a Greek immigrant…

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Thankfully there’s no pizza on the menu at El Ta’koy, which serves delicious Hawaiian-inspired street food in a quirky little restaurant in the cellar of a townhouse in the heart of Covent Garden. Chef Luis Pous was inspired by his time spent on the small Hawaiian island of Kauai, and has combined the multi-cultural influences and flavours of the island with his own twist, to create a variety of unique appetising dishes.

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Head down a narrow flight of stairs and through a door and you enter El Ta’koy’s vibrant green cellar, with foliage hanging from the ceiling, leather banquettes and a Tiki bar with funky oversized rattan pendant lights. It’s like you’ve been transported from cold, damp London to beautiful Polynesia. This is the “kind of place you visit to feel like you’re on holiday”, said Jimmy Rice in Metro. It’s where you “come for cocktails” and “stay for the food”.

We were greeted by the friendly waitresses and we kicked off with a refreshing Tiki cocktail from the cocktail menu, which has a range of different flavoured daquiris, including spiced mango, plus signature Hawaiian cocktails and classics like a piña colada. Let me tell you more about the cocktails at this “fun, flirty little spot”, said Kate Ng in The Independent. They are “dangerously delicious”.

To top it all off, the box also included comforting warm coconut rice and delicately seasoned fresh salmon poke with edamame and seaweed; it was all delicious. We were also recommended the chicken popcorn, and for good reason: Hawaiian fried chicken with a mouth-watering sweet and spicy Filipino glaze and spring onion. My only reservation was if we had room to share a light pudding – I was hoping for a refreshing mango sorbet, or something exotic and fruity – but the only sweet bite on the menu was banana lumpia. I’m sure it would have been a winner, but we just didn’t fancy a heavy pud with hazelnut and chocolate sauce after all the delicious offerings we’d already munched our way through.