Speedboat Bar

From Xu to Viet Populaire to This: The Address That Keeps Shifting

The site at 30 Rupert Street has spent several years cycling through formats under the JKS Restaurants umbrella. It opened as Xu, a Taiwanese dining room that earned genuine critical attention, then briefly hosted Luke Farrell's Viet Populaire bánh mì pop-up. In its current iteration, the room strips back almost every trace of those previous lives. Metal tabletops, laminated menus, plastic napkin dispensers, and Thai football shirts on the walls signal a deliberate step away from the refined-room register that made Xu a talking point. The message is immediate: Speedboat Bar is angling for the casual end of London's Thai spectrum, not the austere.

That positioning matters because London's Thai dining scene has bifurcated sharply in recent years. On one side sit places like Plaza Khao Gaeng, Farrell's other opening, which operates as the fire-forward, southern Thai specialist in the same JKS stable. On the other, a longer list of operators pitching at everyday frequency rather than occasion dining. Speedboat Bar sits at that more accessible coordinate, but with a kitchen behind it that has accumulated enough recognition to give the format credibility. Opinionated About Dining included it in its 2025 Casual Europe list, which provides a useful peer marker: this is a room that earns its place through cooking rather than concept alone.

A Counter-History to Palace Thai Cooking

The editorial angle assigned to Thai cuisine often runs through palace traditions, the intricate preparations of royal kitchens, and the careful techniques that refined street-level ingredients into court dishes. Speedboat Bar occupies the opposite end of that continuum, and understanding why that matters requires some context about where Thai food actually lives in London in 2025. The country's culinary history contains two tracks: the refined, herb-heavy, visually precise cooking associated with court cuisine, and the fast, hot, unapologetically pungent food of market stalls, football canteens, and shophouse kitchens. London has historically imported more of the former, softened and adapted for British palates, while the latter has taken longer to find serious practitioners willing to commit to the register without compromise.

What distinguishes the better end of London's casual Thai tier, including Speedboat Bar, is precisely the refusal to drift toward a mid-Atlantic version of the cuisine. Dishes here draw from the shophouse and canteen tradition: stir-fries built around holy basil, minced meat over rice topped with a fried egg, tom yam bowls with real body and heat. The classic Thai balance of salty, sweet, and sour that structures so much of this cooking is present in the salad built around cashews, pork crackling, and dried prawns. These are not palace dishes, but they are not simplifications of palace dishes either. They belong to a different branch of the same culinary tree, one with its own rigour and its own standards.

For comparison with how this plays out in Bangkok itself, Nahm in Bangkok and Samrub Samrub Thai in Bangkok represent the more research-led, historically grounded end of Thai cooking in the capital. Speedboat Bar shares none of that intellectual apparatus, but in its own category, the kitchen demonstrates that the canteen register and careful technique are not mutually exclusive.

The Room, the Format, the Drinks

The space across two floors manages a split personality with reasonable coherence. The ground floor operates as a dining room in the conventional sense, though the décor insists on informality at every turn. Upstairs, the bar takes over as the primary identity: a pool table, more seating, and a drinks programme that leans into Thai-themed cocktails, Singha beer, and a wine list edited specifically for spice compatibility. The practical implication is that Speedboat Bar can function as a bar with food rather than a restaurant with a bar, depending on which floor you end up on and what time you arrive.

Service is described as functional and responsive rather than attended, which fits the canteen format. Catching someone's attention when needed is reliable. The pace is brisk. These are features of the style, not deficiencies in execution.

Farrell in Context: Where Speedboat Sits Against London's Thai Field

Luke Farrell has become the most visible figure in London's serious Thai tier over the past several years. Plaza Khao Gaeng established his credentials in the southern, super-spicy register. Speedboat Bar operates as a companion rather than a sequel, drawing from a different regional and contextual tradition without trying to replicate the format. The two addresses together cover a broader slice of Thai cooking than either could alone.

The wider London Thai field includes AngloThai, which applies British-ingredient framing to Thai technique, Farang, which operates in a more considered mid-market register, and Kolae, which focuses on southern Thai grilling traditions. Long Chim represents the international-group end of the spectrum. Against that field, Speedboat Bar's positioning is clear: it is the high-volume, no-ceremony option from a kitchen with the technique to back up the informality.

The comparison set matters for value calibration, too. London's upper tier of Thai cooking charges accordingly for the care involved. Speedboat Bar's lunch dishes were noted as keenly priced, which makes it accessible across a broader frequency of visits. That is an important distinction from destination Thai dining at the Plaza Khao Gaeng end of the register.

What the 4.7 Google Rating Tells You

A 4.7 rating across 4,097 Google reviews represents a large sample for a London restaurant operating in a competitive Soho block. That volume of reviews, at that score, suggests consistent execution across a wide range of visits and visit types, from quick lunches to late-bar evenings. It also reflects a crowd that arrived understanding the canteen format and found the delivery matched expectations. This is not a rating built on surprise at finding fine dining in a casual room; it is a rating built on the canteen doing what a canteen should.

Soho itself is worth noting as context. The neighbourhood's density of Thai, Japanese, and pan-Asian addresses means that casual Thai in this postcode competes directly with lower-cost operators. A sustained 4.7 at that volume implies Speedboat Bar has found a defensible position in a crowded micro-market.

Planning a Visit

Speedboat Bar occupies 30 Rupert Street, W1D 6DL, a central Soho address within easy walking distance of Piccadilly Circus. The room splits across two floors, with the bar and pool table upstairs. The drinks list covers Thai-themed cocktails, Singha beer, and a short wine selection chosen for spice compatibility. The OAD Casual Europe 2025 recognition and a Google score of 4.7 across more than 4,000 reviews are the relevant external benchmarks. For a broader picture of where Speedboat Bar sits in London's full dining map, see our full London restaurants guide. London's bar and hospitality context is covered in our full London bars guide, our full London hotels guide, our full London wineries guide, and our full London experiences guide.

For those building a broader itinerary around serious British cooking beyond the city, The Fat Duck in Bray, L'Enclume in Cartmel, Moor Hall in Aughton, Gidleigh Park in Chagford, Hand and Flowers in Marlow, and Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons in Great Milton each represent different points on the country's fine dining spectrum. Speedboat Bar belongs to a different category entirely, but it sits alongside them as evidence of how wide London and the UK's dining range now runs.

Quick reference: 30 Rupert St, London W1D 6DL. OAD Casual Europe 2025. Google: 4.7 (4,097 reviews). Two floors; bar and pool table upstairs.