The St Katharine Docks are a very pleasant, picturesque and pedestrian-friendly part of London that deserves much, much better restaurants than they has hitherto been blessed with. Banquet 88's immediate neighbours are Café Rouge, Côte and Slug & Lettuce and though I can sense some of you bristling with indignant contrary defences of this particular rogues gallery ("The Côte lunch menu is actually pretty good value" ... "The Café Rouge steak frites aren't completely inedible" ... "I once ate at Slug & Lettuce and didn't die"), the fact is that being so close to one of the city's most popular attractions (the Tower is just through an underpass) means that the undiscerning tourist dollar is a considerable and ugly influence.
How odd, then - and pleasantly surprising - that Banquet 88 isn't a lazy proto-chain or timid tourist-friendly slop merchant but a vibrantly authentic modern Cantonese restaurant serving a menu so full of courageous and exciting dishes that it should have any Chinese food-lover (that's lovers of Chinese food, not food lovers who are Chinese, although I'm sure both are welcome) wanting to order from every corner of it.
So obviously, given the menu dares you to go as full Chinese Mode as you can, we tried not to disappoint. This is hand-pulled chicken with jellyfish, a dish that carefully balanced both the obvious contrasting textures - the bounce and chew of the jellyfish with the firmer strips of chicken - and lovely light flavours, with both proteins benefiting from a subtle sesame-vinegar dressing. With strips of crunchy cucumber and spring onion layered on top, this was an immensely satisfying and enjoyable salad (...type thing), very appropriate given the flag-cracking weather outside.
Hot and sour sesame aubergine came so fresh out of the fryer that we could barely go near them for about 15 minutes after they landed on the table, but once the searing hot sugar had cooled down a bit they were great, little gooey sticks all sharp and sweet with an addictive crunch and chew.
Banquet 88 are apparently known for their cheung fun, so we could hardly ignore that section of the menu. This is prawn with crispy red rice skin, which cleverly combined the sweetness and bite of fresh prawn with a layer of crunchy fried doughnut, all wrapped in a traffic-light red noodle wrapper that, we were assured, was not artificial but naturally coloured from the red rice used to make it. The chilli dip was great too.
More dim sum (Banquet 88 are pitching themselves as a kind of updated Yauatcha, with the whole menu available all day) came in the form of these pretty crab dumplings, containing plenty of fresh crab and having a nice just-firm-enough bite. Excellent of course - by this stage of the evening, excellent was becoming the norm.
Cantonese roast pigeon needed a very different skill set to the dim sum but was equally accomplished. The neat little portions each had a crisp, delicate skin next to expertly seasoned meat and was all distressingly easy to wolf down in record time. Perhaps if I'm going to be picky I would have liked some kind of dipping sauce for this, but there was still some chilli sauce and crispy chilli oil left over from the dim sum so that worked well enough.
In some restaurants you're lucky to get your seafood served in the right species of shell - there's been a worrying trend recently to present dressed crab inside scallop shells which is just... all kinds of wrong) but not many places serve fresh scallops not only in their shells but still attached to the very shell they lived in. So not only were these creatures served plump and fresh and dressed in a lovely garlic-vinegar sauce with glass noodles but you had the added joy of prying the meat from the shell, which lifted off in a single satisfying chunk. This is literally the first time I've ever had scallops served this way, and I'm very much hoping it won't be the last.
We did allow ourselves a couple of fan-favourite Cantonese dishes. Half a roast duck was extremely good - perhaps not as life-changing as the multi-course version served at Shikumen in Shepherd's Bush (currently, worryingly closed, though I hope just temporarily) but still mostly everything you could wish for, with another one of those delicately crunchy skins and good soft meat.
Even beef ho fun - something approaching a Cantonese staple - was the very best it could be, with big slices of smoky chargrilled beef, slightly pink inside, enveloped by giant lengths of soft noodles.
Finally from the savouries, a plate of pea shoots was a revelation. On the plate it looked like spinach or bok choy, attractive but familiar. But the taste was pure, summery, sugary pea, with a topping of crab roe to season and enliven it. I'm sure the kitchens at Banquet 88 can work wonders with whatever seasonal vegetables they can get their hands on, but this particular dish will live long in my memory of this dinner, one not short of highlights.
So far so brilliant then, and I'm tempted to ignore the sweet courses and leave on a high note, but it's probably worth wondering why I've never had a great time with desserts in Chinese restaurants. Two different dishes were brought out - a selection of mochi (I know, they're Japanese), and a mango pomelo sago pudding thing, and as expected I didn't much like either of them. The mochi, like any other mochi I've ever tried, were the texture of raw bread dough with all the personality of wallpaper paste, and the mango...thing had a decent mango flavour but a slightly off-putting too-firm texture. I've been lucky enough to eat at some very smart and high-end Chinese restaurants and I've never really understood why so often the wheels seem to come off after the savoury courses are done. But then maybe it's just me.
Either way, let's not dwell on the desserts (I certainly didn't). Banquet 88 had done more than enough to put it right near the top of my favourite Chinese restaurants in London before the mochi arrived and looking back over my photos a few days after I just want to go back and order all the other things I didn't get a chance to sample the first time - abalone maybe, or baked eel, or sake cherry foie gras. And although I didn't see a bill, and though it is possible to load up on some pretty premium ingredients (caviar features in certain corners, I noticed) a quick and dirty sum of the items we chose comes to a food bill of about £170 for 3 people - and we had leftovers. You will certainly pay more for a lot less in other parts of town.
It is, then, and after all, possible to run a restaurant with style and heart in the heart of Touristland, and although I'm not holding my breath for a world-class Southern Thai specialist to open on Leicester Square or for Westfield Stratford to get a Bob Bob Ricard, the point is that maybe we shouldn't be so surprised when somewhere with integrity opens so close to so many places without. And we should be very, very thankful that they have because it's places like Banquet 88 that make London one of the most rewarding and exciting places in which to eat on planet earth. OK so maybe I'm biased. But I'm not necessarily wrong.
8/10
I was invited to Banquet 88 and didn't see a bill.
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