Well, first off, I’m going to have trouble describing the dishes with any exactitude because I do not have a menu in front of me. You know that thing in Chinese restaurants where they answer “no” to any question you ask, regardless of what the true answer transpires to be (whereas in Indian restaurants the default answer is always “yes”)? Well, it’s doubly true with menus. Reviewing Bar Shu last month was a hell of a bore after their refusal to let me take a (cheap plastic) menu away, so this time I went as far as to offer the head waiter £20 for one of his menus.
“No,” he said. “Not enough menus.”
“I’ll bring it back tomorrow.”
“No.”
“£40 and I’ll bring it back tomorrow.”
“No.”
“Just a photocopy would do.”
“No.”
I couldn’t bear to reveal why I wanted it, I never can, it sounds so smug and self-important, so I’ll just have to try and remember as best as I can (and don’t say, “you should have made notes”, nobody makes notes any more, not even war reporters. It gets you recognised as a stooge, and it’s soooo girlie swot).
Nor was this reluctance to part with the menus restricted to the end of the meal. They won’t even give you one at the start, to help you order. They bring you a menu, yes, but it does not have on it all the things you’ve heard about that are supposed to be so good. It’s just the usual Cantonese standards such as lbnrvqi54, 5!!96u2, and %$Bcxfty (real food names not available, sorry, I’d have put them in if I’d had a menu to check) done well, I am certain, but nothing to make a big song and dance about.
Fortunately, I happened to know that there was a different menu containing the good stuff, because my girlfriend lives five minutes away (if you take a short cut through the big estate where all the streets are named after recent stabbing victims) and everyone is talking about the area’s first decent new restaurant in years. So I asked for it. And, to be fair, they brought it. But WHY? Why do you have a duff menu to hand out first to non-Chinese diners, preferring not even to let us see the more challenging dishes you offer? It seems a bit racist. Imagine if the Fat Duck gave a dumbed-down menu of simpler dishes to black people.
On the new menu were some really much more exciting things, which I obviously can’t tell you about either. I can’t even tell you the names of the ones I actually ordered, because, in common with all Chinese restaurants, Dragon Castle presents a non-itemised bill at the end of the meal containing only a total. That total was £154.20 and I would guess that we had 16 dishes, so removing, at a guess, £24 for the South African Chenin Blanc (wines I can usually remember), £7 for two Tsing Tao beers, £3.50 for a glass of sauvignon, and £12 for three bottles of water, all I know about what we ate was that each thing was more or less a sixteenth of £107.70.
I would have an easier time remembering what they were if so many of the things I had ordered had not been unavailable (which is perfectly OK, in general, but unusual in Chinese restaurants) and if two or three things I hadn’t ordered had been delivered in lieu of things that I had (something that happens all the time in Chinese restaurants without one noticing – so it is testimony to the quality here that I was able to tell where accidental substitutions had been made). When I asked what was up, they muttered something about menu changes that I may or may not have been supposed to understand.
Still, I don’t want to quibble. They’ve been open a few months but they’re still new, and possibly a little bewildered. They no doubt signed for this site – a breeze-block lubyanka down Elephant and Castle – from a small office in Kowloon, believing it to be prime Mayfair real estate, and are only just now getting over the shock. But the food, when it comes, regardless of whether it’s what you ordered, is fantastic. Absolutely fantastic.
The spare ribs were short, meaty double ribs of perfect pork in a top class goo, as succulent and unchewy as you can imagine (not spare at all, in fact). A plate of cold sliced pork hock involved dozens of wafer-thin slices with dashes of something (chilli and soy?) whose name, obviously, I can’t tell you. But I loved it. Salt and pepper aubergine with chilli and garlic was sublime – no grease, no bitterness, an almost fruitlike tempura with a gleeful kick. Prawn and pork dumplings were beautifully made and teeming with flavour.
Various grilled shellfish are offered in a multitude of ways. I’d tell you them all if I could, believe me, but there were certainly lobster and crab and palourdes clams as well as the razor clams I chose (at £4 a clam), doused in sweet, golden garlicky oil.
Some of the hotpots were on, some were off. Of those they had, the one of eel and pork belly was most memorable. Sweet chunks of pink marinated belly jostled in a clay pot with maybe a dozen cross- sectional slices of eel, looking like little halibut steaks. Wonderfully complementary meats – fatty sweet pig pulling and pushing with lean, muscular serpent – in a rich and bubbling juice with luscious, whole fat garlic cloves.
The chicken hotpot had great flavour too, but the butchery was a bit off. It seemed as if a madman had gone at the whole carcass, skeleton in, with a machete, so that every morsel, even the tiniest, was sharded with fragments of bone (though it was, I remember, described as corn-fed, which is as close as you get to named- breed, organic, small flock, free range, in a Chinese).
There were eight or nine kinds of oriental veg (water spinach, Chinese broccoli, gai lan, bok choi, choy sum, king kong, big ming, bling bling… can you tell which of those I was forced to make up?) offered ten or twelve ways, creating a glorious panoply of green options.
Look, this place is terrific. Absolutely terrific. Best Cantonese I’ve seen in ages. It has the huge, busy feel of the really good middle-tier eating houses in Hong Kong, and food of a quality that they’d queue round the block for even there. And while Elephant and Castle is a stabby shite hole of staggering grimness (not just grismal, not even grimaldi, but grimsky-korsakov to the total max) my girlfriend has chosen to live there, so I love it.
I just wish they’d sort out the menus and explain the confusion. (Oops, they have – see below).
Dragon Castle
114 Walworth Road, SE17
(020-7277 3388)
Meat/fish: 4
Cooking: 8
Welcomeness in these parts: 10
Score: 7.33
Price: as above
Dragon Castle
114 Walworth Road, SE17 (020-7277 3388)
Yes, yes, I know I’ve just reviewed Dragon Castle, and this is supposed to be about somewhere else. But, in a way, it is. You see, a couple of days after writing my review I popped back for some dim sum, and several things happened. Most importantly, I had the best dim sum I’ve had in ages.
If you’re bored with that sine qua non among dim sum joints, Royal China, you’ll find lunch at this place more relaxed, jollier, and the menu considerably more rugged, with excellent garlic whelks, tripe, duck’s tongue and marinated chicken claws, as well as perfectly executed dumpling standards, loads of specials, good noodles, and some great surprises, like the fat, lush, crispy deep-fried aubergine cakes filled with prawn and dried scallop. It’s also cheap.
The other reason I’ve re-reviewed it here is that I discovered they are about to incorporate the two opposed menus into a single list, which explains why they didn’t have certain dishes, explains why they didn’t want to part with a (soon-to-be-superannuated) menu, negates my criticism of their two-menu system and makes the old review irrelevant in almost every way.
