Yum Cha, 25th October

The final stop in my quest for soupy dumplings in London was Yum Cha, an age old recommendation from Secret London on Twitter, back when they still did that. Previously I've had good ones at leong's Legens but I wanted to see how these would fare in comparison so we popped there for dinner before the St vincent gig at the Roundhouse. The place is so well known for its dim sum that it serves it all day. luckily for us,

Despite its looks from the outside, this is no cheapo skanky place down an alley in Chinatown. It is tastefully decorated, warm and inviting, even though some of the staff are decidedly less so. 

I was here with the sole intent on having soupy dumplings but they don't make a whole meal so we had a few other bits and pieces too. To my great surprise Stephen had never had shredded duck with pancakes so we got some of those. You can never go wrong with this really and it was a tasty and generous portion of duck with just the right amount of pancakes and trimmings.

Our dim sum arrived in a stack of steamers. We had a perfectly tasty honey roast pork bun each. Nothing wrong with these two dishes but they were pretty much what you could get in any average Chinese restaurant. 

The soupy dumplings were served, unusually, without spoons, making me think there wasn't much soup inside them, and sadly lost quite a lot of it when I bit into one of the dumplings. I didn't make that mistake again and was pleasantly surprised by the amount of broth (and the fact that it didn't burn your mouth). I did miss the ritual of pouring the soup out but they were very tasty.

Even better were our szechuan minced pork and peanut dumplings. Absolutely divine, we wished we were smart enough to keep the sauce they came in to dip our other bits into. Salty, spicy, deeply flavoured. I'd love to duck in here on a cold day for a couple of servings of these.  

I don't know why we do it, but for some reason we decided to order something a little different - 'ribs' from the steamed dim sum menu. Had we given it more thought I think we would have realised that steamed ribs weren't going to be to our taste. The bones were cut into little chunks on the bone and steamed, meaning you had to chew off the mushy meat from off the bone. It wasn't a pleasant texture at all and a total bummer to end the meal on. 

Our dishes were in the 4-5 pounds range, except for the duck whic was a bit more, as it always is. Five dishes got us nicely full for the evening so we ended up paying about 15 quid each for dinner with drinks. Bargain!

Sichuan Folk, 4th May

When Stephen told me about a new Sichuan place in Brick Lane, I was in no hurry to go. I don’t know – I guess I just felt that there were a few places doing good Sichuan and did I really need to try another one... would it stand a chance of bettering places like Ba Shan or Silk Road?

Well, I’m not saying Sichuan Folk was necessarily better but it is definitely worthy of a visit. The place itself is really nice – the exterior doesn’t give you an accurate impression of the peaceful, tasteful décor inside.

Service was warm and just lovely. Our waiter asked us if we’d been before and when we said we hadn’t (and that we liked it spicy) he went through the menu and picked out the best dishes from each section for us. He highlighted way more than we could actually eat so we narrowed it down to two mains and a starter but there were plenty of choices that I thought sounded really good and that I’d like to come back and try, not least the cumin lamb.

So, in the end, we had their signature pork dumplings, the twice cooked pork and 'beef in a spicy and lip-tingling sauce' with some steamed rice. Each dish had a varying element of spiciness to it, but none of them were overwhelmingly so – they weren’t so spicy that you couldn’t make out the unique flavours of each one. The beef had, as you might expect, a deep, meaty flavour and hidden among the broth of chillies were bean sprouts and bok choi as well as tender pieces of beef. It was, indeed, lip tingling.

The pork I think might have been my favourite. It was thinly sliced pork belly with onions and peppers and was served with four hirata-style buns for you to stuff with filling. Despite the oil this had an almost dry taste to it, the meat being practically crispy it was so thin.

As our dumplings arrived, our waiter, up to the very moment he set them down, continually spooned the soy and chilli sauce over them to be sure they were completely coated. They were a decent size too – big enough to take a bite then spoon some more sauce into what remained before finishing it off.

I was holistically impressed with this place – really good food, a lovely setting and helpful, friendly service. I think this place will get a lot of custom from us.

Silk Road, 10th April

Chinese is arguably my boyfriend’s favourite cuisine, but, while I enjoyed the odd chow mein or spring roll, it wasn’t something that I routinely craved. Discovering the regional cuisine of Sichuan, Hunan and, now, XinJiang has rather changed that.

While they’re all, obviously, different regions, they do have similarities in their liberal use of hot peppers and offally ingredients. Ba Shan is an excellent example of this and Silk Road, where I went on Wednesday, is another.

There’s at least a handful or reviews and blog posts about this place and I must admit I’m not really adding anything new to the canon. Silk Road is cheap, delicious, and a pain to get to. More of a café than a restaurant, we remembered to book a few days before we planned to go and as we heard them turning people away, saying there was a one hour wait, we realised it had been essential. From just after we arrived the place was full and stayed that way all night. On a Wednesday! In the depths of Camberwell!

I had heard that the menu was quite short but it was still long enough for it to take us quite some time to decide on which dishes to choose. They all sounded pretty good and we didn’t want to waste our long trip down (and back) by ordering something sub-par.

There were four of us and we went for the following:

• Big plate chicken
• Double cooked pork
• Pork and celery dumplings
• Eight lamb skewers
• Bak choi in garlic sauce (we felt like just ought to have some veg – our mothers would be proud)
• Shredded tripe with onions and chillies (a wild card dish at Stephen’s insistence that we try something different)
• Two boiled rice.

The pork and celery dumplings came first. You get ten for £3.00 and each dumpling was very generously filled. They were great, slightly chewy dough with juicy pork and finely shredded celery inside. It’s not a combination I’d had before but it really worked, with the celery adding a lightness and freshness to the dumplings.

Shortly after the double cooked pork arrived – thin slices of it thoroughly coated in a sweet, hot sauce with liberal red and green chillies. That sauce was fantastic – the first bite had quite a kick to it but it was manageable if you didn't eat too many of the fresh chillies at once. The pork was soft and each bit had a bit of naughty fat on its edge.

I worried that they might bring my least anticipated dish at the end – the tripe, but luckily, it came out as we were halfway through the pork. It didn’t look that appetising – the onions and tripe were pale and drab with the fresh green chillies the only vibrant and inviting thing on the plate. We all had a tentative bite and pronounced it – OK! The tripe was soft, the texture not unpleasant, and, to be honest, didn’t have much of a taste. It was inoffensive. We had a few forkfuls each and then eagerly went back to finish off the pork.

Then the skewers arrived. From my reading I knew not to let these sit on the table for too long and quickly grabbed my two skewers. Each skewer had about 6 little morsels of crispy, fatty lamb dusted with cumin (I think). They were amazing. My favourite dish up until that point.

The piece de resistance was, of course, the big plate chicken. A massive bowl was brought to the table full of a steaming brown sauce, star anise scents emanating from it. There were the requisite chillies floating about – fresh green ones and those dried red chillies that must have been soaking in the broth for so long they had rehydrated. There were large chunks of potato and of course the chicken pieces on the bone.

We scooped out several pieces of chicken and potato into little bowls, with a bit of the broth and all marvelled at the taste. I have never tasted chicken like it. It didn’t even look like chicken – it looked like barbequed pork. It was so dark, so fully had it absorbed the flavours from the soup. They must marinate the hell out of that chicken. The broth had a very savoury taste to it that was incredibly more-ish. But this was also where the heat lay and it was easy to forget this when you were spooning it out. There were sniffles all round.

We’d only taken a little out of the pot when the handful of noodles (the largest noodles I’ve ever seen) were dumped into the plate. I’d thought this happened when you’d completely depleted the dish of meat and potatoes, but no matter.

Such was the size and length of them, one portion worked out to about two noodles each. Now, I like noodles, but normally I’m more of a fan of the thinner, glass or rice noodles. These were thick, but flat, and meaty, chewy. Slightly sweet. I loved them.

Our feast started to defeat us and we weren’t able to completely finish our big plate, though we did dredge the bowl for the last pieces of chicken. I finished off my share of the rice by adding lots and lots of the soup to create a savoury rice pudding, which in my humble opinion was a fantastic creation.

By this point, I’d ingested so many chillies I think I was beginning to feel a bit spacey. You don’t even really notice it at first but that burn slowly builds. Our very garlicky bak choi provided some relief from the heat, but I kept dipping mine in the soup thus defeating its cooling qualities.

We paid our bill – a princely £15 each (including tip) and departed.

Why, oh why does it have to be in Camberwell?! I’m jonesing for those lamb skewers even now, and sooo want to try the other dishes I’d heard were good – the home style aubergine and cabbage, the fried dumplings. One day I’ll venture there again. 
One day.

Ba Shan, 29th January

Similarly to the rest of the world, Stephen and I wanted to get back in shape after our Christmas indulgence. We also wanted to go to Ba Shan. We made a deal with ourselves – if we were good for two weeks, we would reward ourselves with dinner out.

Two weeks passed and I didn’t lose any weight, and Stephen didn’t even bother to measure whether he did or not. But I had been going to the gym regularly, and that had to count for something. To further our own argument, we decided to walk from our house into town, a good two hours’ journey on foot.

We wanted to go to Ba Shan because we have been to both of its sister restaurants – the Baozi Inn, and Bar Shu (which is situated diagonally opposite Ba Shan). The Baozi Inn has become Stephen’s favourite go-to place for a cheap bite ever since he first sampled their dan dan noodles. Both places specialise in Sichuan food, which is a cuisine that favours lots of chillies, on everything, though you temper this by starting with a cold appetizer. They’re also quite partial to dishes involving offal.

Ba Shan is a little pricier than the Baozi, but not as expensive as Bar Shu. It is also influenced by the Hunanese region as opposed to just Sichuan. After two hours of walking we were pretty excited to be eating and could have fallen into the trap of our eyes being bigger than our bellies. The menu labels some starters and then lists the rest under whether they’re pork, beef, veggie etc and when the price of a pork dish is the same price as one of the starters, it’s a bit of a guess as to whether it’s of main dish size or starter size. But having experienced the portion sizes of similar places, we erred on the side of caution and only ordered three dishes between us.

Those three dishes were – Chairman Mao’s braised pork belly, lamb stir fried with hot chillies and sliced pig’s ears with hot chillies. At Stephen’s behest we had decided to be a bit more ‘adventurous’ and not stick to the safe things we always choose. I was fine with this – I thought they might turn out to be similar to other odd-sounding things I’d eaten lately (boar jowl and lamb’s neck to name a couple) that really turn out to just be normal-looking cuts of meat (though the lamb neck did freak me out a bit when I’d eaten all the meat off it and could discern the vertebrae). And of course some steamed rice to make us look a little less like total carnivores.

First to arrive was the lamb and rice. Absolutely delicious, we gobbled down half of the dish before realising quite how hot it was. There was quite a lot of ginger in the dish, as well as a Christmas colour scheme of chillies – fat chunks of red and green chillies confetti all over the meet, with a few of those dried red chillies that actually aren’t too pleasant to eat dotted among them. 

Utterly delicious lamb

Then came the pigs’ ears slices and as soon as it was set down we realised we had made a mistake. They looked slimy.  And then, when you ate them, they tasted slimy. Worse, in the middle of each bit was a thin strip of what must have been cartilage. No amount of spices and herbs could disguise that texture which reminds you that you are eating something which you would normally discard. We were very dismayed. Stephen became chivalrous – he said he would eat a spoonful to make it look like we’d had some, and then fished out some of the meatier strips that were more like real pork (although still strangely soft) to give to me. Eating those gristley pigs ears just proved to me what I have thought all along – such foods as these may have had their place in a time when food was scarce (and you can apply this to snails, insects, tripe) but in the modern day there is no need to include it on menus. 

It looks better than it tasted

Thankfully we had saved some of the lamb, and the pork belly was still to come. Now, the highlight for me was the lamb, but the pork belly was indeed very delicious. It came as eight large cubes of almost crimson-coloured meat, sitting on some pak choi (or bok choy, not sure – are they even different things?) and with sauce collecting at the bottom. The Chinese/Sichuanese/Hunanese know how to braise meat. My theory is that this is because they don’t have knives and therefore need it soft enough to cut with a chopstick. Which this was. This dish wasn’t hot at all – it isn’t meant to be – but we had lots of chillies left over from the uneaten ears so I added a few to mine. And then we polished off the lamb, almost erasing all that unpleasant ear business and leaving the meal on a high note.

Like a lot of chinese places, the most applicable compliment you could pay to the service was that it was 'efficient'. We didn't have a reservation and were told when we arrived at six that we'd have to be out by half seven. As we hadn't planned on making an evening of it, this was no problem at all to us, and we were actually in and out within an hour. The atmosphere isn't too bad and the background music is a little out of the ordinary for a Chinese restaurant - contemporary pop music, and none too bad either.

One last thing – Stephen had a lychee drink as his beverage and it was lovely!

And on that note, remember:

Find the menu & restaurant information on Zomato