Banquet 88, St Katharine Docks

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.

Hong Kong Restaurant, Angel

London has never been the kind of place where you can just pick a restaurant at random and have at least a decent dinner. There are too many tourist traps, dingy fast food joints, grim chains and bandwagon-jumping copycats (just see how many smash burger joints have appeared in the last few months) scattered around the city for you to need at least a little research before deciding where to spend your food money.

But it can also be said that this is a town where there is an awful lot of "decent". If we ignore, for a minute, the best-in-class that suck up all of the attention, and do our best to avoid the real dregs at the other end of the scale, there's still a vast swathe of enjoyable, independent, competently run restaurants in-between that while you might not make a special journey across 6 tube zones to visit, if you happen to find yourself in a particular part of town and in need of a nice dinner, fulfil their role more than adequately.

One such place is the Hong Kong Restaurant on Upper Street. A Cantonese diner offering all the usual classics, and complete with shopfront cabinet in which hang various types of roast and glazed poultry in true Chinatown style, it has the settled, confident style of somewhere that's been around for decades but it's all in fact a very clever deception - it's barely a year old. It was about 2/3 full at 7pm on a Friday night, but then as anyone who's continued to commute into central since Covid will tell you, Friday is the new Monday, so having 2/3 of your tables occupied is pretty good going.

We started with some crab Xiao Long Bao, which although perhaps not quite as cleverly constructed as the ones at Din Tai Fung (the filling here was more solid than liquid) still had a lovely flavour and plenty of crab.

Turnip cake were very good examples of their kind, crisp on the edges and soft and salty inside, again with bags of flavour.

But my own favourite of the dim sum dishes were these prawn bean curd rolls, a delicate thin casing containing a fresh, bouncy prawn filling thus making a very addictive mix of textures and marvellous fun to dip into chilli oil and/or soy (as is your preference) and munch down on. I'm going to look out for these on menus in the future.

Roast duck (well I had to choose something from the cabinet) was good as well - probably not quite worth the £22 for a half but a solid main course and satisfying end to the meal, with a nice moist flesh and salty, sticky skin. Again, not any of this stuff is unique in Cantonese restaurants in London (not even, I'm guessing, the prawn bean curd rolls despite the fact I've never come across them before) but for £36pp including beers and tea, there are certainly worse ways to spend that amount of money. Oh and service was attentive and friendly, unlike certain way more famous places in Chinatown I can name...

Hong Kong Restaurant, then, succeeds on its own terms by being a decent (there's that word again) local restaurant charging a reasonable amount of money, and doing everything well enough to get itself firmly onto my 'If I'm in Angel and want a not-extortionate dinner' list. There really isn't that much more to say, and so hence the rather terse review. Some places are just good enough. And there's nothing wrong with that.

7/10

Shikumen, Shepherd's Bush

I often think the most difficult thing to do in the world of restaurants is occupy the middle ground. If you're either a no-holds-barred Mayfair fine dining palace of splurge, or alternatively an ultra-low-budget dining hall in the New Cross, your audiences know exactly what to expect (and what they might expect to pay) and you've got no further explaining to do. But a mid-range restaurant will have to persuade a more moneyed clientele that the dip in prices and décor is still made up for in competent food, and that the budget diner will find enough above their usual spend per head to consider the odd indulgence.

It's a balancing act, one fraught with danger, but get it right and your middle-ground restaurant stands a chance of beating both the high- and low- end joints at their own game. And here to make the case for friendly, dependable mid-range Chinese is Shikumen in Shepherd's Bush, where you'll spend neither a pittance or an arm and a leg but stand a very good chance of coming away with one of the most rewarding Cantonese dining experiences in town.

The devil, as ever, is in the detail. Har gau were sticky and plump, with plenty of prawn filling and piping hot. Dipped in the house flaked chilli oil or hot sauce (both are great) this was top dumpling work.

Turnip puffs were an interesting delicate cone shape (and therefore less overwhelmingly carb-y than they can be)...

...cheung fun were excellent, both the crunchy dough stick variety and the prawn and bean curd, both of which impressed in different ways with their textures and strong flavours. I'm yet to discover a way of eating these slippery little fellas with chopsticks that doesn't involve abject humiliation on my part, but fortunately thanks to my friend being half an hour late and it being towards the end of service, not many people were around to witness it.

Oddly the only element of the dim sum that didn't completely win us over were the Xiao Long Bao. They were admittedly cleverly and precisely made little things, with a good amount of soupy filling and delicate casings, but the flavours veered between self-consciously wacky - cheese, or squid ink - and ever-so-slightly-too-plain pork. Still worth ordering, but not quite up to the level of the Din Tai Fung crab & pork.

But hold your presses everyone, because Shikumen are about far more than dim sum. I've been lucky enough to have fairly high-end roast Peking duck at various places in town - Hutong's was good though I've not been for years, as was Gold Mine in Bayswater. But this here was on another level - skin so light and delicately treated it just dissolved in the mouth, and neat slices of tender flesh that had a awe-inspiring balance of fresh game and soft fat. It was utterly lovely, so much so that rather than assembling the flesh inside steamed pancakes and dressing with hoi sin like we were supposed to, I ended up just eating the meat by itself, revelling in the complexity of taste and texture. If there's a better roast duck in London I'll be very surprised.

The joy of the duck didn't end with the pancake course, either, or the first few slices of golden skin dipped in sugar. After we'd had our fill of the former, two bowls of opaque duck soup were brought out, studded with spring onions and thickened with soy milk, which drew yet another bewilderingly complex set of flavours and textures from the bird. If you should ever go to Shikumen - and you very much should - to leave without ordering the duck would be a mistake on the level of going to Flatiron and ordering a salad.

So, for excellent dim sum and a truly world class roast duck, paying £45 a head including service and a couple of beers sounds like something approaching a bargain. If treading the middle ground of any particular cuisine's offering is difficult - and it undoubtedly is - it only means that when it does go right, it goes very right and we end up blessed with an operation like Shikumen who can hardly be faulted at all, treated either as an occasional special occasion or your new neighbourhood go-to Cantonese diner. But however you choose to approach Shikumen, I hope you enjoy it every bit as much as I did. Oh, and order the duck.

8/10

We were invited to Shikumen and though this time we did SEE the bill, we didn't pay it.

Bang Bang Oriental Food Hall, Colindale

I'm not really sure how to go about reviewing a food court, or even if it's possible. Technically a collection of restaurants all using the same dining space, and sharing little else in common with each other than branded plastic bowls and plates, recommending (or otherwise) Bang Bang Oriental Food Hall is potentially no more useful than recommending "Soho" as an area based on the strength of meals at Hoppers and Kiln. Yes, if you go to Hoppers or Kiln, you'll have a great time. But what if you end up at the Breakfast Club? Nightmare.

So, this post comes with a disclaimer - I loved Bang Bang, but perhaps I was lucky with the stalls I ate at, and maybe not all are up to the same standards I enjoyed at the conclusion of a 21-stop(!) trip up the Northern Line to Colindale on Sunday. There's a part of me suspects very strongly though that I wasn't just lucky, and that picking your way through the myriad of options in this aircraft hanger-sized food court is one of the most enjoyable ways of spending your weekend it's possible to have.

First up, fried pork dumplings from Xi Home. The minimum order is £9.80 for 12 of the things, which seems like a lot until you start eating them and then realise it's nowhere near enough. Each had a good amount of pork mince and enough stock to occasionally fire a boiling hot squirt of liquid across the room when you bit into them, which was as hilarious as it was tasty.

Uncle Chilli specialise in Sichuan cuisine, which if you're not aware largely means two things - lots of heat, and lots of offal. The menu listed 'skewers' at £2 each, but instead of being presented with things on sticks like I was expecting, the slices of beef trip, pig stomach and beef brisket were served in a big bowl of soup, blazing with Sichuan peppers. The trickier bits of a pig - particularly anything involving intestines - will never have universal adoration, but this stuff is my own personal regional Chinese heaven.

Also from Uncle Chilli was a bowl of Century Eggs, hen's eggs treated to a mysterious process I think involving salt and ash which makes the yolk go dark green and the white turn transluscent amber. Doused in soy and garlic, they're a classic Sichuanese/Hunanese snack, and well worth ordering if you ever see them on a menu.

Soft, salty slices of belly pork, soaked in oil and soy sauce and topped with minced garlic, were similarly addictive. Many of the concessions at Bang Bang are offshoots of larger restaurants - One 68, for example, is run by Royal China - and if that's true of Uncle Chilli I really want to visit the mothership. Because these people are good.

Speaking of One 68, their dim sum is excellent - here piping hot siu mai of fresh, bouncy seafood, going very well dipped in chilli sauce...

...and silky cheung fun, bulging with big fat prawns and worth every bit of the £4 or so they cost.

Just as in Chinatown itself, it's impossible to not be tempted by the glistening, golden brown roast ducks hanging in the Four Seasons stall, and it's a pleasure to report they ate as good as they looked here at Bang Bang, with a nicely seasoned breast meat skin,and without a hint of dryness. Next to it on a bed of rice is pork belly, with a delicate crisp skin and expertly rendered, moist flesh.

And we weren't quite done yet. Pastries from Wonder Bake included somethings called 'Lava cheese tarts', an interesting cross between savoury and sweet that had a hot, molten filling. Oh, and the Pandan Egg tarts weren't bad, either.

So yes, maybe we were lucky. Maybe the ramen from Samurai Ryu isn't brilliant, or the Pad Thai from Little Thai Silk isn't worth the money. These are possibilities. But it makes sense that if the same people that curated the inclusion of Royal China, Four Seasons, Uncle Chilli and Wonder Bake also had the same standards set for their fellow stallholders then chances are it's all bloody good. In fact, the only reason Bang Bang may not be for everyone is that eating all this fantastic food does involve a rather fraught ordering process (order, pay, take wireless buzzer and then try and remember which of the 30 stalls it came from when it starts buzzing) and seating, especially during the hours we were there, is quite hard to come by - expect a gaggle of people to gather nearby whenever it looks like you're gathering your coat to leave.

But these are normal food court things, and hardly a reason not to visit. Even the journey, way up to the top of the furthest above-ground reaches of the Northern Line, seemed like a very small price to pay as we rolled home, happy and full, to our south of the river homes. Every Londoner should be happy that Bang Bang exists, but residents within reasonable distance should be absolutely over the moon, and planning their next visit as soon as possible. Indeed, new stalls are still opening, so it's only going to get busier - and better - from here. Happy eating.

Xi Home 9/10
Uncle Chilli 9/10
One 68 8/10
Four Seasons 8/10
Wonder Bake 7/10

Overall 8/10

Amidst the chaos of ordering I only managed to take a photo of one of the bills - from Uncle Chilli. Other prices are as above.

Cha Cha Moon, Soho

There are few restaurateurs that have had as dramatic an impact on the way this country eats than Alan Yau. The man who created an impressive number of famous restaurants such as Michelin-starred Chineses Hakkasan and Yauatcha, and plush Japanese Sake No Hana in St James (though not still involved day-to-day with very many of them), he is perhaps best known for being the founder of the extraordinarily popular Wagamama chain, which has so many branches now up and down the country - and around the globe - that they're almost as almost as ubiquitous on the high street as Boots or Marks & Spencer. To be honest, I'm not a fan of Wagamama - it's timid food served as quickly as possible, and the bench seating is infuriating for a number of reasons - but then I'm a snobby Londoner with access to places like Koya and Chilli Cool; I can easily see why they've been so popular elsewhere.


So the guy has a decent track record. And he has been very successful, perhaps thanks to the very clear set of expectations crafted by his restaurants. So far, each has filled a certain specific role; Hakkasan is posh Cantonese, Yauatcha is posh dim sum, Saka No Hana is posh Japanese. Similarly, Wagamama is budget Japanese and Busaba Eathai is budget Thai. So presumably Cha Cha Moon is budget Chinese except - what's this on the menu - Dolly mee goreng is Malaysian isn't it? And Fujian style udon is most definitely Japan. There's Thai chicken curry, Sichuan chicken, Singapore fried noodles, Indonesian satay, baby back ribs!? - geographically, it's all over the place. And if you think that pan-Asian restaurants are doomed to mediocrity because no one kitchen can master such a wide range of styles of cooking, Cha Cha Moon is unlikely to change your mind.


First thing to arrive - dishes are just brought out as and when they are ready - was a warm crispy duck salad. I suppose the duck was technically crispy in that it had been deep fried to near-oblivion, but thanks to the shredded flesh soaking up the fryer oil like a sponge, it was unbelievably greasy. The salad itself was dressed in what I can only assume was simple syrup as I didn't detect anything other than sugar, and while ordinarily I'd compliment their generosity on such a large portion for your £7.90, in this case it just meant there was more sickly, greasy gunk to wade through. Hideous.


Singapore fried noodles were better, but then so is driving a ten-inch cook's knife through your thigh. It was a bit sweet, a bit bland and despite being marked on the menu as "spicy" we couldn't detect even the slightest hit of chilli, but at least it was fresh and just about edible. Still, this was the kind of thing you could get from any High Street Chinese takeaway in the country, absolute bog-standard fare, and was £6.90.


These spring rolls tasted exactly like the ones you can get in the plastic cartons from Tescos. That's not to say they were in any way inedible, I just have this old fashioned notion that people visit restaurants to eat food they can't reheat themselves in the oven for a quarter of the price. They came with some kind of tamarind-based dipping sauce that made them taste of tamarind-based dipping sauce instead of spring rolls. We used up all of the sauce.


I can't begin to tell you how awful the baby back ribs were. The cloyingly sweet sauce (described coyly as "tangy" on the menu) they came soaked in wasn't enough to cover the appalling smell of commodity pig and the meat was so overcooked and formless it was like eating rancid pork-flavoured blancmange. Unspeakably bad, and although perhaps nothing can quite beat the ribs at Hard Rock Cafe for sheer catastrophic terror, these weren't far off. Pitt Cue in Soho is still the only place in town I've eaten ribs of any kind worth paying for.


We drank sickly lychee-flavoured cocktails and cheap white wine, as you tend to do in these places, and after gamely working at the more edible elements of the food, scurried off wondering what on earth just happened. Alan Yau has dropped so many balls with Cha Cha Moon the streets of Soho could be used to film a Sony Bravia commercial. With its directionless, geographically vague menu, timid and incompetently prepared food, and piercingly loud room fitted with those dreaded communal bench seats, it's hard to find anything even remotely positive to say about the place. Oh - the staff were very pleasant and there were lots of them so you never had to try to hard to get their attention. But for God's sake, even the toilets were shoddy - Alan Yau's places are famous for always having nice toilets, even the budget ones. It's baffling, and my meal was miserable, but all said and done, this is Soho and alternatives are hardly in short supply. Eat somewhere else. Eat anywhere else.

2/10



I was invited to review Cha Cha Moon