Xi Home Dumplings Bay, Liverpool Street

I often like to look up the situation of restaurants I'm heading out to on Google Streetview, just so I know what to expect when I get off the bus and lessen (though not completely mitigate) the chance I might head off in completely the wrong direction. I wouldn't recommend doing this for Xi Home just yet though - Blossom Street until recently was a dark, dodgy alleyway round the back of the old Water Poet pub (RIP) and if you Streetview their address today you may be forgiven you're being sent, Goodfellas-style, to a shakedown joint never to be seen again.

Fortunately, and whatever you think about the flattening of the Water Poet and environs, Xi Home is today part of the swanky new Blossom Yard development, and along with Sri Lankan restaurant Kolamba East is spearheading the what I believe I'm supposed to call "regeneration" of this little area just north of Liverpool Street. And to be fair to the Blossom Yard developers, who could have probably filled the spots very easily with a Gordon Ramsay Street Burger and a Black Sheep Coffee, both Kolamba and Xi Home appear to care about what they're doing, and are doing it very well for not much money.

The problem, such as it is, with Xi Home and many other Chinese restaurants, is that the menu appears to be geared towards groups of 4 up sharing. And there's no problem with this of course - the more of the menu you get to try the better, and there's hardly any finer way to spend time with friends and family than working your way through dumplings and noodles. But with a minimum dumpling order of ten(!), if there's just two of you there's a choice to be made between having quite a lot of the same thing, or over-ordering and taking home leftovers. We chose the latter.

The dumplings, as you might be wondering, were wonderful. Fluffy and soft and piping hot, we went for the Spanish Mackerel variety because I'd never tried them before, but the abalone and even the lobster versions from the 'premium dumplings' section were the same price - about £19 for 10 from memory. There's something particularly addictive about the way that the pastry in well-made dumplings behaves in the mouth, all bouncy and tacky and silky at once, and these were extremely well-made.

Cold shredded chilli chicken was another classic Xi'an (I hope I'm right in saying - I've learned a lot about regional Chinese food over the last few years but I'm definitely still a beginner) dish, with a fantastic balance between poached poultry and earthy chilli heat. Peanuts and spring onions added some crunch, but the star here was the chicken itself, soft but firm, perfectly cooked and nicely presented.

Tempura king prawn with wasabi mayonnaise demonstrated that when Xi Home wanted to go a bit Japanese fusion, they could do it pretty well. The mayonnaise was just the right side of bitter, and the prawns were huge things with an excellent firm bite.

I've been a fan of murgers (it took me four attempts to type that as my computer kept autocorrecting to burger) since I tried the version by Murger HanHan, which now have branches all over the city. This was, I'm almost certain, even better, with an amazing flavour from the soft pork belly filling and the flatbread being just crisp enough on the outside to hold together, and thin enough to not muffle the pork. Really good stuff.

But amazingly my favourite dish wasn't the murger, or even the dumplings, lovely though they both were, but this glorious plate of green beans, dried chilli and ground pork, which despite being arguably one of the least complicated things on the menu, completely charmed with its glossy charred veg, crunchy bits of pig and just the right level (as in, quite a lot) of chilli heat. I'm told this was just as impressive reheated the next day, so it was the dish that gave on giving. A must-order, I'd say.

I hesitate to mention service when I'm on an invite like this, because obviously it's not often representative of what you might find if you just wandered in off the street, but staff were so enthusiastic about the menu they were offering and happy we enjoyed it that it was all rather charming. And I'm sure energy like that can't just be turned on for the press.

Anyway, they had every right to be proud of themselves because Xi Home is a genuinely accomplished and exciting new addition to the food options near Liverpool Street. It's not expensive (price per head would have been about £35 I think with a couple of beers), even less if you went for a less premium dumpling option, and it's now firmly on my recommendation list for this part of town. RIP the Water Poet, long live Xi Home Dumplings Bay.

8/10

I was invited to Xi Home and didn't see a bill.

Din Tai Fung, Covent Garden

There was a time, back when blogging was young and Twitter just a twinkle in a racist's eye, that when a new restaurant opened there would be a kind of competitive dash to be the first to review it. This wasn't just for bragging rights (although clearly that was a large part of it) - the first reviews ended up higher on the search engine results, and being early meant you had the whole internet hanging on your every word for at least as long as it took other bloggers and the print press to catch up. Even now, a decade on, some of the blogs of places I've visited while the paint was still drying still feature on the front page of Google.

But after a while, you begin to prioritise a nice evening over soft-launch pricing and bragging rights, and soon realise that there is far more to be gained in waiting a few weeks for service to settle and for the kitchen to get into the swing of things before turning up with your camera. This is especially true of international dumplings sensation Din Tai Fung, which was prohibitively oversubscribed for the first few weeks while the Instagram crowd got their fix and yet now, four months on, I and a friend were able to wander in off the street at 2pm on a Wednesday lunchtime and be seated straight away. Which immediately put us in the mood to enjoy ourselves.

And enjoy ourselves we very much did. Look, perhaps I know very little about most of the food I critique on a regular basis, and even less about Chinese food in particular, but it seems to me that DTF have, in much the same way as Shake Shack have done for burgers, absolutely cracked the art of the mid-range International Chinese chain. I love Shake Shack, but is it the very best burger in town? Probably not - Bleecker have a bit more soul, and are that bit cheaper, and there's still nothing to beat the MeatLiquor's bacon cheeseburger when it's on form. But I find myself a regular customer of Shake Shack because I know exactly what I'm going to get each time, even if that comes at a cost. There are better Chinese restaurants than Din Tai Fung. There are cheaper Chinese restaurants, more innovative and exciting Chinese restaurants. But for sheer consistency at a level that most customers would be more than happy to settle at, Din Tai Fung is a genuinely remarkable operation.

From the "cold" section of the menu (you order using pencil and paper, and food is brought as soon as it's ready, which in most cases is "immediately") this is drunken chicken, neatly sliced into strips of lovely wobbly skin and tender flesh. I love how so much Chinese food subverts your expectations of the best ways of serving particular ingredients - the concept of cold poached chicken seems it would always lose out to a nice piece of fried or roasted, until you try it and it seems like the nicest, most natural thing in the world. Sure, it could have done with a bit more seasoning, a bit more soul, but it was still hugely enjoyable.

String beans were the kind of vegetable dish only the Chinese could get so good - by virtue of being fried in animal fat and covered in minced pork and dried shrimp. We polished off every last trace of it, picking off the final chunks of crunchy pork bits one by one with our chopsticks.

Sichuan noodles, neatly rolled into a dark, oily sauce, came topped with prawn dumplings and made another dish that though difficult to love, was impossible not to enjoy. Yes, it missed some of the fire and flavour of the Sichuan dishes at Jin Li, or some of the best examples at Silk Road, but this was a generous pile of excellent fresh noodles and fluffy dumplings, and if the worst you can say about it was that it was a bit polite, well, that's hardly in the end much of a criticism.

The main event at Din Tai Fung is of course the famous Xao Long Bao, painstakingly crafted soup dumplings that you gingerly transfer from the steamer to your mouth without hopefully either splitting the delicate casing and losing some of the soup, or alternatively attempting the process too early and giving yourself third degree burns. Get the timings right though, and you're rewarded with a wonderful burst of pork stock and a mouthful of mince dumpling, and a very clear illustration of why people flock to these restaurants the world over. Again, I'll caveat the above with the fact that I've had slightly better XLB elsewhere - most recently at Dumplings N More in Hillcrest in San Diego whose stock had more flavour, and I'm reliably informed Dumplings Legend do a very good version here in London - but at £10.50 for 8 pieces, considering the work that's gone into them and how easy it surely is to cock them up, these are very fine XLB indeed.

So there it is. Colour me impressed. I went into Din Tai Fung with an open mind, as I always try to do, but I do admit there was a part of me worried that this latest branch of an ever-growing international chain could easily be a rollout by the numbers, yet another bunch of faceless corporate types taking London for a ride. It could, let's face it, have been the Chinese Planet Hollywood. Instead it's a delight to report that from the friendly, attentive service, to the attractive and, yes, authentic menu, to the extremely precise levels of quality control, Din Tai Fung is a textbook example of how this kind of thing should be done, and London is all the better for its arrival. And, as it's within 10 minutes walking distance of the office, and the queues seem to be a thing of the past, I can see myself being a regular. The best things come to those who wait.

8/10

Beijing Dumpling, Soho

Eating out as disastrously regularly as I do, I am often accused of asking "higher standards" of restaurants than your average punter. Usually when I am accused of this, it just means that the person making the accusation has a different view of a restaurant than my own, so perhaps "average punter" is shorthand for "me". Anyway, that aside, I still don't think the charge sticks - yes I eat out far more than is healthy or necessary, but that doesn't mean my objective standards are higher, it just means that I have a slightly more comprehensive overview of what constitutes value in a meal out. They may be queueing down Shaftesbury Avenue in depressing numbers to pay £18 for commodity steak frites at Jamies Diner, but how many would be there if they know Zedel Brasserie were doing much better just around the corner for £9? Actually, don't answer that, I don't want to know.

The point is, it is possible to enjoy a vast range of standards in food and service as long as you feel like you're getting your money's worth, and you aren't aware of anywhere doing the same thing either better for the same price, or the same for cheaper. To this end, it's possible I enjoyed my lunch at Beijing Dumpling far more than the friend I ate it with because what I know about the restaurants and food of Chinatown would make a very small slogan inside a fortune cookie, and my friend (Lizzie Mabbott) has written a book on the subject.

So on this occasion (in common with most others), I was playing "average punter" to Lizzie's expert, and happy for once to put aside all thoughts of whether better was available elsewhere for less, I actually really rather enjoyed myself. As the name suggests, dumplings are the thing here, made fresh and by hand in the window of the premises, and available in a variety of styles. First up were the mythical Xiao Long Bao, rarely seen outside the best Chinese restaurants because, not to put too fine a point on it, they're an absolute bastard to make. Each lovingly-wrapped dumpling contains a portion of pork filling and - the clever bit - is itself swimming in a measure of rich stock, meaning the method of negotiating this delicate bag of boiling hot liquid from the steamer to your mouth without it either exploding down your top or dealing third-degree burns takes almost as much skill as that required to construct it in the first place. Lizzie thought the pastry casing was a bit clumsy and thick, and there wasn't enough liquid. I got soup all down my top.

Cucumber salad came in a silky sesame/garlic dressing and was just the thing to help cool burning tongues. It was chopped up and dressed fresh to order, we watched them do it from our table, a detail that surely didn't hurt the flavour.

Next, a generous bowl of spicy chicken dumplings in soup, which wasn't anything much greater than the sum of its parts but still very easy to eat. Well, easier than the Xiao Long Bao anyway.

Perhaps we should have paid closer attention to the use of plurals on the Beijing Dumpling menu but I still don't think anyone would realistically expect "Seafood Supreme Dumpling" to be literally one massive saucer-sized dumpling on its own in a steamer. There it was anyway, like a beached deep-sea creature, and we were baffled as to how to approach eating it. You couldn't chop it in half because you'd lose the soupy insides. You couldn't somehow drain the liquid first without special equipment or perhaps with the use of a straw but thought that might get us thrown out. We half considered forming a makeshift lattice out of four chopsticks and lifting it in a co-ordinated movement onto a separate plate, but eventually decided this too was going to prove impossible. In the end I think we sacrificed some of the liquid and gingerly peeled chunks of it apart using a soup spoon - hardly ideal, but less humiliating than the alternatives. It had a good fresh seafood flavour, you'll be pleased to hear.

The bill came to £37 for two, and at the risk of repeating myself, whether you consider that acceptable depends on how many other better £37 dumpling meals you've had in the centre of London. Speaking purely for myself, in my temporary role as an average punter, it seemed perfectly decent - service could have been a bit better (they seemed to be operating some sort of quota system on ice cubes, strictly one per customer only) but this didn't really spoil anything. Chinatown will most likely never be my comfort zone, but at least now I know where to get some nice, fresh, handmade dumplings. Even if I don't quite yet know how to eat them.

7/10

You Me House, New Malden

Compared to other SE Asian cuisines, Korean is strangely overlooked in this town, for some reason. Chinese is effortlessly well represented at the top (Hutong, Min Jiang) and the bottom (Silk Road, Chilli Cool) ends of the budget, you'll never want for a good Vietnamese meal if you're anywhere near Battersea or Hackney, and every high street in town has a Thai restaurant despite the fact none of them are much good. But while there are a couple of Korean restaurants lurking around Zone 1 (Kimchee, Asadal, Koba), they had, for presumably very understandable reasons of rent and overheads, been tame and rather overpriced, and with indifferent service borne of the kind of location that gets a healthy tourist footfall.

So it was during yet another interesting but ultimately disappointing meal at popup Jubo in Shoreditch last month that I and a friend finally vowed to pull our fingers out and make the trip to where we'd constantly been told is the home of authentic Korean cooking in London - New Malden. Actually, as we both live near Clapham Junction, the journey to New Malden station itself was fairly trivial; the problem is that unlike, say, Kingsland Road or Chinatown, the restaurants are spread out over a large, anonymous stretch of South London suburb that makes planning your destination in advance a neccessity. We'd settled on You Me House (either a bad translation or they really do want to sound like a Cbeebies TV show) after a tipoff from a New Malden regular, promising authentic food on a budget.

It started extremely well. The (You Me) house snacks consisted of some crunchy mung beans in a sticky dressing and bean sprouts in sesame oil, and both those and a boldly-spiced, gently fizzy house kimchi were devoured even before any decisions were made about which other food to order. House beer was something called 'Hite' that tasted of precisely nothing, which is probably the point.

Of the main dishes, there were two highlights. Chilli-salted chicken had that knobbly, bubbly coating that all the best Korean chicken does, and the flesh inside was nicely moist. I would have a liked a bit more chilli perhaps, and slightly more acidity in the coating, but it was still a good example of this kind of thing.

Steamed dumplings were huge, soft, doughy affairs, generously stuffed with a pork/herb mixture and full of flavour. The dough, in fact, was so good it was perfectly edible on its own, which is just as well, as after cack-handedly shredding the things apart with a spoon and chopsticks to create chunks small enough to swallow, you tended to end up with either pork, or dough, and only very rarely both.

Other dishes were, if not unsuccessful exactly, then at least slightly more everyday. Bibimbap was perfectly good but the fierce heat of the stone pot overcooked it almost before we'd had a chance to take a bite each. Thin strips of beef rib, too, stood little chance of being tender after 30 seconds on a white-hot iron griddle, but still managed to retain a faint memory of a gentle garlic marinade. Only a beef and noodle dish was a real disappointment, the house-made noodles suffering under the weight of a gloopy black sauce of no discernible flavour.

We had massively over-ordered, and had to take much of the leftovers home in plastic boxes (which they were happy to provide), and so our bill came to a not-insubstantial £56.70 for two. But at a very conservative guess I'd say even half this amount of food would have been enough, and with that in mind I'm pretty sure you could have a very nice meal (dumplings, chicken, kimchee, perhaps some rice) for no more than £15 a head. And for that reason, it's hard to criticise You Me House too much. Service was charming (it's family-run), the place was clean and bright, and with a menu this size it's not hard to imagine I could have ordered much better. So here's to next time.

7/10