15-17 Broadwick Street, W1 (020-7494 8888)If you know anybody who has been to Yauatcha in the few weeks since it opened then you will no doubt be labouring under the impression that the dim sum are to die for. This is because Yauatcha is a restaurant that was designed specifically with people who say things like “to die for” in mind.
The grey, slate, ripply-textured tables are to die for. The pale-green china teacups chosen by Hsieh Chih Chang, “the noted Taipei tea mistress”, are to die for. The Richard Rogers Ingeni building, in which the restaurant is housed, is to die for. The interior, by some frilly-shirted Frenchman called Christian Liaigre - including starry ceiling, bar with slimline fish-tank front and glazed cherry blossom sprays - apparently took three attempts and £4.5 million before it became good enough to die for. Shame. Another couple of tries and two million quid more, and they could have made the corridor I ate in feel a little less like a Tokyo bus shelter. Although many Tokyo bus shelters are no doubt to die for.
And then there’s the totally to-die-for outfits of the staff, designed by some thwarted dancing master who claims to have made the ludicrous pyjamas worn by the cast of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a film in which Chow Yun Fat killed everyone because they were so badly dressed.
And then there are the staff themselves, who are said to be very good-looking. They are certainly clean and without acne and have big-deal hairdos. But none of them look like they’d be much fun to shag, which is surely the point of beautiful people. The ugliest old cretin can bring you a plate of dumplings and a cup of tea.
And damn good dumplings they are, too. The dim sum chef has been brought from Hakkasan (another minimalist torture chamber in a scary basement staffed by good-looking morons and owned by Alan Yau), where the dim sum are, no question, the tidiest in London.
And they are very tidy here. As good as the best I’ve eaten in Hong Kong at the sort of places that are preferred by the very rich as opposed to seekers after true palatal excitement (“dim sum” literally translates as something like “little heart-touchers”). As such, the har gao (prawn dumplings) were perfectly formed and clean and the cheung fun (slender rice cannelloni usually containing prawn or char siu and best translated as “slithey toves”) were
dazzlingly light, the rice-flour dermis translucent as aspic.
Scallop siu mai were brilliantly constructed (a laterally halved scallop on a plump shrimp) and blessed with a smudge of flying-fish roe rather than the scallop coral that speckles more familiar, generally beef-plumped, Chinatown manifestations. A prawn dumpling garnished with gold leaf was spectacular to look at but dreary to eat (I think the gold must have been frozen - it certainly wasn’t organic, and may have been cruelly transported across Europe in brutally small bullion crates). The shark’s fin and seafood dumpling consommé was luscious, though identical to the one you’ll know from Hakkasan (if you’re a rich bastard and always go where the guidebooks tell you).
The secret of all this tidiness was freshness. That’s all. Listen, they make a big deal about “dim sum masters” and how spiritual it all is. Trollocks. They’re little parcels made from two kinds of flour (a high and a low-protein version) rolled into a ball, spun to a disc on the flat of a big chopper, and twisted into a pretty shape with a nice bit of fish or meat and a blip of something spicy, then steamed in great towers over a roiling cauldron. No mysteries. I’ve not only eaten dim sum in the best restaurants in Hong Kong, I’ve cooked it in them, under the keen eye of Yip Wing Wah at the Peninsula Hotel’s Spring Moon restaurant, for example. And I tell you, mine tasted no worse than these. And mine differed visually only in that they looked like they had been thrown into the basket from the window of a speeding train. But if your dumpling goes from chef’s hand to steamer and on to the plate in a number of seconds that David Beckham can count up to, it’s going to taste right.
I was annoyed by the ignorance of the staff. “Char Siu Bun” means nothing, so I asked the waiter if these were “char siu pau” or “char siu sau”. He had no idea. The fact that simply asking such a question marks me out as a complete tosser is irrelevant. The customer is always a tosser, but he must be answered.
They were “pau” (fluffy steamed puffs), as it turned out, rather than “sau” (shiny baked triangles) but the “sau” end was sewn up by what they called “baked venison puff”. And they were stunning. As was the congee (rice porridge) with preserved egg and pork and the crispy “box dumpling” and the “spinach cube with prawn and water chestnut” which was a
stupendous emerald ball of crunchy ocean. Most magical of all was the salt and pepper quail: a sweet and exotic golden pocket containing perfectly roasted, perfectly purchased bird.
These flashes of wit and genius made up for the ropey pork spareribs, the lazily flavoured sticky rice in lotus leaf and the frankly shameful arse-up they made of the fried turnip cake, which came slopped on a pedestal like the winner of the “Crappest Omelette of the Year” competition and tasted like something Baldric might have found in his smock pocket.
However good some of the food was, this is the sort of restaurant that makes me want to saw off my foot and leave it on the table until it goes green, just to slap the punters and the staff out of their dopey
minimalist trance. How dare they go around saying that Yauatcha will serve dim sum all day from 10am to 11.30pm and then come round at 3.45 (when the earliest table they could give me was 2.30) to ask if I want anything else because the kitchen is closing?
What a load of old tonk “minimalism” is, anyway. And it’s Japanese tonk, too. What’s it got to do with dim sum? The Chinese like their dumplings wheeled on steel trolleys through vast red and gold halls by women screaming their wares. Yau has tried to encourage a bit of that communitarian feel by forcing strangers to share tables, which is fine on a big round one, but not on a poncy little grey rectangle where there is no room for your food, left-handers like me have a terrible time clunking elbows with right-handers next to them, and your neighbour’s spit ends up in your congee. Early in the meal, the nice lady sitting next to us (with her nice American husband) called a waiter over and said: “Look, this table-sharing is not civilised. It might be all right for 17-year-olds, but not for grown-ups.” They only moved tables but, citing the very same motive, they might equally have moved restaurants.
Food: 8
Atmosphere: 5
My table: 3
Score: 5.33
Price: Very reasonable, to be fair. £20 a head will feed you well.
Penk’s
79 Salusbury Road, NW6 (020-7604 4484)
I’m not recommending Royal China or Hakkasan or Chuen Chen Ku for the dim sum again because I do it all the time. So here is a nice little restaurant in Queen’s Park with a new chef where I’ve recently had lovely saltimbocca, salad niçoise, fish terrine, roast brill, courgette fritters, that sort of thing.
Café Japan
626 Finchley Road, NW11 (020-8455 6854)
The woman who fronts this place is probably the nicest person in the world. Busy hands work fast slicing great sashimi, the black cod is great and they always have plenty of flying-fish roe (which is a link to the main piece if you really want one).
E-mail feedme@thetimes.co.uk if you think your local deserves a visit.
