24 Romilly Street, W1; 020 7287 3266. Mon-Fri, noon-11pm; Sat, Sun,
noon-11.30pm
No stars
Five stars Tip top Four stars Tip your hat Three stars
Tipping point Two stars Tip and run One star Rubbish tip
I’m not very good at crusades. All that packing. All the single-issues zealots
and sad monomaniacs you have to share the bus with. I know papers are
supposed to campaign, especially Sunday papers — what else is there to do on
Sunday except resurrect, redeem and rejuvenate? Save the spavined, abused
and humiliated, the overlooked, lost socks of the world. I know I ought to
campaign, and I’ve been given a privileged opportunity, a platform, a
pedestal, a pediment — or is it a promontory? — a pinnacle, a pointy place,
and I really should grace it with more edifying and improving stuff than
this exhibitionist cogitation, this ego-mooning. I do have every intention
of getting some sad inadequate out of prison, or stopping a big pharma
selling verruca ointment that causes chavism in the pregnant under-15s. I
do, in principle, want to give a croissant to every orang-utan, but the
truth is, I can’t keep up the interest, the focus. I get so bored. One
minute I’m looking at depilated rainforest and thinking, “This far and no
further, Paco — I’m going to stand, Tiananmen-like, in front of your JCB
thing”, and then, a moment later, I see another glum Indian standing in a
mud field with parrot pluckings in his ears and it just makes me think I
need to get more Miracle Pumice and Guacamole No-Tangles Frot-and-Go
Conditioner.
That’s the thing with campaigning and crusading — it’s such a commitment to
goodness. Consequently, I haven’t done quite as much pro bono sneering as I
might have done. There have been a couple of short campaigns, not so much
crusades as unsolicited Jehovah’s door-knocking. You might remember my call
for pro-active sex education in junior schools: the Just Say Yes campaign,
which I think made a little headway. Then there was my grass-roots movement,
Save a Pig — Eat a Horse, and the shortlived Hug a Hijab.
I suppose the most sustained and heartfelt bee in my bonnet, however, the one
I could and did bore on about like a queue of minicab drivers at a Mongolian
barbecue, was tipping. Specifically, the restaurants who use the service
charge to make up the minimum wage. My fury about that has never waned. I’d
grab the managers by the lapels; I’d loudly and embarrassingly send back
bills to have the discretionary 12.5% removed; I lectured guests, friends,
other critics and strangers in lavatories; and I relentlessly harangued you
until the subs begged me to stop. But it seemed to me to be perfectly,
obviously immoral, duplicitous and unfair. The minimum wage is one thing; a
tip is another. One is the obligation of an employer; the other the
gratitude of a customer. It is achingly clear that managements’ Scroogeish
greed amounted to stealing from both patrons and staff while pleading for
loyalty from both. It was cretinously venal, but there are worse offences
against humanity. More pressing and shaming humiliations and cruelties,
graver injustices. But you begin to improve your world by picking up the
litter at your feet. What infuriated me about the service-charge thing was
that it wasn’t being done to distant children in sweatshops, it wasn’t in
countries of which we knew nothing and expected less, it was right under our
noses on the plate in front of us. It was being done to people who smiled at
us every day, who bought us nice things, who were friendly and attentive.
Anyway. Now it’s been fixed. The government has announced that using tips to
make up wages is going to become illegal, and that’s a good thing. It may
not be a hugely good thing, it may not be the cure for ugliness, or the end
of smelly feet, but the road to the Elysian Fields is cobbled one good deed
at a time, and there is the added blessed irony of this government sorting
out other people’s expenses instead of their own. I’ve been listening to
restaurateurs whine and bellow about this infringement of their rights to
extract profit from those least able to protect themselves with a mounting
self-satisfaction. They say this is a misguided and ignorant interference in
free enterprise that will lead to redundancies, lower wages, higher prices,
bankruptcies and suppurating yaws. All of which were exactly and precisely
the arguments used by slave-traders and owners to justify their employment
practises. Whoever thought we’d get to hear them again?
So I can now say with some smugness that I embarked on a crusade and I reached
Jerusalem. I have made the lives of the least-regarded, the huddled masses,
a little easier. There are now Australian bus boys and Croatian sommeliers
who, as they eat their breakfast of leftovers in the basement sculleries of
the nation, are saying a little prayer thanking me for my charitable
magnanimity and selfless fortitude. I expect, all over the country, the
newborns of servitude are being christened A or AA, and that, behind the
green baize door, my byline photo is pinned up aside St Hollandaisius, the
patron saint of side orders. I was in a sadly shabby little cafe this week,
and as I left the waitress pressed a 50p bit into my hand. “Thank you, sir,
for looking after us,” she whispered. I palmed the coin with a maître d’s
sleight and smiled with a beatific insincerity. Thus I have, with one grand,
gallant campaign, confirmed my seat at the table of the elect. I can now
continue to do whatever I like: live a life of gratuitous selfishness,
greed, sloth, avarice, lust and petulance, because I am travelling first
class on the gravy train to nirvana. Eat my sanctimony, suckers!
The staff at Ba Shan certainly earn their tips. The service was unusually
friendly for an oriental gaff: fast, precise, helpful and anticipatory. It
was the food I resented paying for. If this had been some culturally worthy
Ming mime then I’d have applauded with the gusto we round-eyes reserve for
theatrical performances from the East that we can’t comprehend. The fly in
the soup was the soup. The Blonde and I went on the highest recommendation
and took with us Patrick Kielty, the Irish comedian (in case you hadn’t
noticed. How easily do these words collide? Irish and comedian? The bacon
and eggs of ethnic calling. Like Irish kiddie-fiddler). Anyway, he needed
all the depth of his infinite humour to keep up with the shaggy-dog joke
that was the food.
The seats were the first thing I noticed: they were, in fact, small occasional
tables, designed for people without buttocks or perhaps a surplus of
buttock. The decor is that particular Chinese school of gratuitous undesign,
where a room is tortured until it reveals where it buried the feng shui.
This one had been turned inside out so that its insides looked like an
outside with fake eaves and tiles and stuff. The food was in keeping with
the precipitous decline in the capital’s oriental kitchens as Hong Kong
immigrants find better-paying and more cerebral things to do than shovel
chow mein down the throats of drunken Geordies. It was awful. Badly
seasoned, viciously oversalted, with flavours that elided into a Pot Noodle
brownness. Sad little polyps of dim sum were stuffed dough balls. Dim sum
should only be made in quantity with a high turnover — perfect for China,
where gazillions of people want to eat very fast all at once and talk at the
same time. Selling two or three an hour in Soho is best not started or
ordered.
I do wish this restaurant had been better. I wish the recommendation had come
from someone who could tell the difference between the entrance and the exit
of his own alimentary system. But I can’t blame the Chinese for not wanting
to cater to the cheese-eaters; I just wish they’d stop trying to get away
with this sort of stuff.
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