On the site of the Pink Giraffe there has arisen a pan-Asian street-food restaurant which bodes well to become a fashionable success. A darkened and deliberately informal interior, bench seating, and beer served in camping mugs all serve to create a somewhat self-consciously hip venue, whose message is that it's all about the food.
And the food is very good - beautifully presented even when in takeaway boxes, there's a good range of small nibbly dishes such as dumplings, jeon (Korean pancake) and edamame, with a sensibly small range of main dishes - noodles, curry and bimbimbab (fried meat and veg on steamed rice, topped with an egg).
For a meal that was mostly fried, everything was remarkably ungreasy. Possibly aiding the impression of lightness is the relatively small portion size - we ordered what seemed like a long catalogue of dishes but got through them rather fast. The most substantial of the starters we found to be the bao (essentially a Vietnamese veggie-burger in a delightfully fluffy steamed bun).
The oddest of the starters we sampled was broccoli salad - tender, crunchy broccoli stems in what appeared to be a dilute prawn cocktail sauce. The tastiest was probably the nyona tofu - large tofu chunks anointed with sweet chilli, fried to a pleasant chewiness and dressed in the Malaysian style, with peanuts and cucumber. The pork dumplings also were excellent - a thin dough, with savoury but unfussy filling. Another dish we can recommend is the padron peppers - an Asian twist on the classic Spanish tapa is provided by the lightness of the batter and a dash of five spice.
It would be very easy to spend quite a lot of money here - starters range from £3.50 for prawn crackers (!) to around £6 for fried chicken or noodles, and the mains are about £10. This would be fine if the portions were larger, but for some dishes, for example the kimchi jeon, one gets only a mouthful or two of deliciously squidgy, spicy substance for one's fiver.
The small range of main dishes is rather limiting for vegetarians, but pretty much everything can be adapted to tofu. It is not especially convenient for those with allergies but you are encouraged to ask for an allergy menu. There was no available information on sustainable sourcing of meat and fish, but, delightfully, the takeaway boxes are made of compostable card rather than plastic or foil.
This would be a good place to take a trend-conscious date for a light meal, but unless you're persons of small appetite or deep pockets, you'll probably want to plan a trip to an ice cream parlour for later in the evening.