Bar Shu, Soho

In a part of central London where restaurant sites seem to change hands every few months, Bar Shu is a pleasingly permanent fixture. In fact this was one of the first places I ever reviewed on the blog, all the way back in 2007, and it seems that even as a newcomer to fiercely authentic Sichuan cuisine (as I was back then) I was quietly impressed.

In the years since, I've been fortunate enough to enjoy some fantastic Sichuan meals in London, from Lewisham to Bloomsbury to Camberwell, and though I can't pretend to have anything near a full grasp of its nuances and varieties (there are a breathtaking number of regional variations within the vast Sichuan province itself) I do at least know vaguely what to expect, and can order a plate of pock-marked old-woman's beancurd without chuckling.

Even so, the power and intensity of authentic Sichuan cooking still has the potential to take you by surprise. Even the table snacks at Bar Shu, peanuts dressed in a remarkable chilli/Sichuan pepper powder, are painfully addictive, tasering your mouth with metallic zing whilst also teasing with salt and umami. It's quite the rush.

"Mouthwatering" Sichuan chicken was precisely that, a riot of flavour and intense chilli heat that battered all of the senses at once. Part of the joy of Sichuan food, at least real Sichuan food, is that the sheer complexity of the way the different elements are balanced together is key to its success - you're never quite sure exactly where the sour, sweet, salty etc. components are coming from but you know it works, and you know you want more of it.

Pickled veg were nicely done, with a good balance of vinegar and sugar, something to cool the palate in between mouthfuls of fiery mouthwatering chicken.

Cloud ear fungus is always a must-order dish, and was very well done here with plenty of powerful seasoning and nice big stalks of crunchy coriander. If you've not yet had the pleasure of trying this stuff, try and imagine slightly gelatinous weirdly fleshy mushrooms. In fact don't imagine that, I'm making them sound horrible when actually they're lovely. Just try it, you won't regret it.

Sichuan cuisine boasts a huge number of different, interesting ways with offal, and this classic dish - "man and wife offal slices" had a variety of the more unusual parts of a cow (including, but probably not limited to, tripe and lung) dressed in another wonderfully complex, powerfully flavoured sauce.

For a bit of variety, and with a vague nod to health, a plate of morning glory was bouncy and fresh and - like everything else - perfectly cooked and seasoned. I don't think I've ever had a truly disappointing vegetable dish in a Sichuan restaurant; they always seem to get this kind of thing exactly right.

Of course we also had to order the aformentioned pock-marked old woman's beancurd and completely wonderful it was too, the tofu being incredibly light and the sauce rich and packed full of flavour. I appreciate I'm being a bit thin on the details when it comes to describing these dishes but even accounting for my staggering ignorance of one of the world's great cuisines, there's something about Sichuan food, as I said earlier, that almost defies description. There's a lot going on, and attempting to cover it all in a few sentences seems almost reductive.

We finished with a Bar Shu classic - whole sea bass in chilli oil - which despite its size and presumably the challenges it presents to cook, was actually perfectly timed, the flesh coming away from the bones in nice clean white chunks. A real showstopper of a presentation, too, guaranteed to turn heads.

As this was a hashtag invite, we didn't see a bill, however in the interests of fairness it's probably worth pointing out that Bar Shu is no budget affair. If you're used to paying low prices for your Sichuan food in London's outer boroughs then the prices here (our meal would have come to about £125 with a couple of beers) may raise some eyebrows. But having said that, this is Soho, and in this smart room populated by attentive, pleasant staff it feels entirely reasonable to pay a little premium.

And as I said, the food is of such a high standard you're not going to regret opening up your wallet a bit and making the most of it. The typically giant Sichuanese menu contains some real gems, a chance to sample defiantly authentic regional Chinese food right in the middle of Theatreland. While many of its neighbours have come and gone over the years, Bar Shu has seen little reason to change its winning formula and has come out of the other end of the Covid pandemic as confidently (and as popular) as ever. Long may it continue.

8/10

I was invited to Bar Shu and didn't see a bill.

Liu Xiaomian at the Jackalope, Marylebone

I may as well come clean - restaurant He and today's review subject weren't picked completely out of the blue. True, they were handy from the office and reasonably priced, but they were also, crucially, well-reviewed by Marina O'Loughlin in the Times, someone who has a fairly unblemished track record of recommending excellent places going all the way back to when she was the Metro's in-house critic. These days, thanks to a paywall and my own lifelong boycott of any Murdoch product (I'm from Liverpool) I only get to read the first couple of paragraphs, but it's usually enough to get the gist of the place. So thank you Marina for another lovely noodley lunch, and may one day your later paragraphs be revealed in full.

Much like He, Liu Xiomian offer a short, attractive menu of regional Chinese specialist dishes, in this case Chongqing, a sprawling province to the south east of Sichuan with whose cuisine it shares much in common - think hot, numbing soups studded with Sichuan peppercorns, and a fondness for hot pot. Your choices at their residence at the Jackalope in Marylebone (a lovely place to pub even if you're not eating) are wheat noodles, or glass noodles with either minced pork or "vegan" (not sure and don't really care), and a separate option of 10 x "numbing pork wonton". I ordered the pork noodles and wonton (spice level "hot"), because why the hell not, and was soon, via a Shake Shack style remote buzzer ordering system, rewarded with two very colourful bowls of Chonqingese loveliness.

I started with the wontons, as they felt like more of a starter. With an almost ethereally-light, silky texture they spoke of a kitchen right on the top of its dumpling game, and were so easy to eat they practically jumped down the gullet. The flavours were balanced and rewarding - a complex broth of chilli oil and spices, enough heat to clear the sinuses but enough pork for it to still be the main ingredient. Yes, they were very good, and I polished them all off in about 30 seconds.

Similarly the wheat noodles, clearly well made and with a good bounce, came topped with a generous amount of minced pork and more of that rich, hot red oily broth. Extra texture in the form of some toasted peanuts floating about amongst it all, a really nice little touch. Perhaps I didn't quite need two full bowls to myself for lunch, but I'm equally sure that just one wouldn't have been enough, so overall I think I played it quite well.

So yes, at £20 (plus £3 for a Sprite) for a noodle lunch this isn't perhaps quite as good value as He, or indeed other noodle joints in Chinatown, and as such loses a point. But even if this isn't an every day lunch spend, it's still exciting, fresh, handmade Chinese regional food, the kind of which you're unlikely to find in many (if any) other places in town, at least until they open their second branch at the Holborn Whippet, even more dangerously close to the office. Pray for me.

There we go, then, another friendly, exciting specialist Asian operation, authentic and honestly realised. God knows there's enough to be terrified of in Brexit Britain, but for as long as London remains open and welcoming to talented food people from all corners of the globe, we may as well make the most of it. I certainly bloody will.

8/10

Mr Wong's, Holborn

Mr Wong's describes itself as a "Traditional Malatang Louisiana Seafood Boil". Having walked past it dozens of times on the way to work, it always confused me, and having now eaten there I can't say I'm much the wiser. Surely you can have a traditional Malatang hot pot restaurant, and a Louisiana boil restaurant, but there's nothing traditional about the smashing together of Sichuan/Beijing hot pot and Southern USA cajun cooking. Perhaps it can be done - never say never - but if it does ever happen, it would struggle to attract the adjective "traditional".

As it turns out, Mr Wong's is a traditional - if somewhat eccentric - hot pot restaurant, the kind of which have sprung up in the dozens in the Bloomsbury area over the past few years. And this is all perfectly fine - there's absolutely no such thing as too many hot pot restaurants - I just wondered where the idea of attaching the words "Louisiana boil" came from, given they weren't serving any crayfish or corn or sausages or Old Bay seasoning or anything like that at all. Perhaps the words "Louisiana Boil" accidentally fell out of the Mandarin - English dictionary in the same way as the foot-high "EXTRA SITTING[sic] UPSTAIRS" text somehow accidentally found itself glazed into the windows of Mr Wongs, as we soon discovered said "extra sitting" proved just as elusive as crayfish and corn bread. With the grand total of 9 downstairs seats already taken we asked about overflow accommodation. "No, just here" was the firm reply. I thought about gesturing towards the promise of "extra sitting", hovering in reversed text just in our eye line, but decided against it.

We didn't wait long, anyway, and were soon sat down waiting for a menu. A short while after that, it turned out there wasn't one, and we were instead given a small plastic laundry basket and told to fill it full of anything, from the refrigerated shelving at the end of the room, that we wanted to form part of our Traditional Malatang Louisiana Seafood Boil. Now, I don't know if you've ever loaded raw chicken into a laundry basket, and I hope very much that you haven't outside of the context of a hot pot restaurant, but I'm here to report it feels very strange, like being asked to pour gravy directly onto the dinner table.

To accompany my chicken I chose wood ear fungus, glass noodles, bak choi, enoki mushrooms, spinach and finally a large helping of tripe, because if I was going to construct myself a complete disaster of a hot pot I may as well fail in style. My order was weighed - £17 worth - and whisked off in the dumb waiter to be (presumably) stir-fried and added to broth. Having noticed that all of the drink options - milk tea, iced tea, Coca Cola - contained caffeine, I asked if I could just have some tap water.

"We don't have any cups," came the confident response, clearly indended to be the end of the matter. After clocking my stunned expression, though, they helpfully added, "but you can use one of those?", nodding towards a pile of small metal bowls on the shelf above the trays of "beef aeorta". Politely declining their kind offer to lap tap water out of a metal bowl like a dog, I slunk back to my window seat and hoped things wouldn't get any more weird.

In the end, though, the food was quite lovely. It turns out that even if you haven't got a scoobie what you're doing when selecting hot pot ingredients, by the time it's all fried up together and drowned in Sichuan peppercorn broth you end up with something that looks remarkably edible. It's actually quite flattering. With a definite punch of chilli and dressed in fresh coriander and spring onion it was, if not quite worth £17 then at least a damn sight better I was expecting given everything that had led up to it. I would even come back, to have a better stab at filling my laundry basket, remembering of course to bring my own bottled water.

More than anything, I'm glad Mr Wong's exists. There are surely better hot pot restaurants, and there are definitely better Louisiana Boil restaurants (try Plaquemine Lock in crayfish season, it's great) but what kind of city would this be if we didn't allow the odd expression of confusion-fusion madness, of putting raw meat in a laundry basket, and of drinking water from a bowl. Such is life's rich tapestry, and there's enough room in this old town for it all. Maybe one day, in this city of innovators and entrepreneurs there will indeed open a Traditional Malatang Louisiana Seafood Boil and if there is, you can be damn sure I'll be first in the line to try it.

7/10

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.

Chick'n'Sours, Dalston

You'd be forgiven for thinking the last thing East London needed was another fried chicken joint. Scourge of the high street, bane of the nation's health, they are seemingly beaten only by betting shops in their ability to suck the joy and life out of a place, and have a similarly virus-like capacity to multiply and conquer an urban center. Where once were charity shops and Poundlands are now Tennessee Fried Chickens and William Hills. It's not exactly progress.

But not all fried chicken shops are created equal. Proper fried chicken from the Southern States of America, the kind popularised by Colonel Sanders before he sold his share of the business and standards slipped in the 1960s, was by all accounts - and is, if you know where to find it - a wonderful thing. The closest I've come to the real deal is Streetcar Merchants of San Diego, whose salt-brined chicken, served white or dark to order, was almost enough to banish the memory of Chicken Cottage forever. My friend Helen wrote about it here; you can see why we fell in love with the place.

Even if Chick'n'Sours served nothing but seasoned drumsticks and thighs it would still be better than anywhere else in London doing the same, thanks partly to some extraordinarily good fowl (good strong bones and plenty of rich dark meat, a million miles away from the usual broiler birds) but also to a nifty hand with a pressure-fryer, which welds the coating onto the skin and ensures every bite has a mix of crunch, seasoning and good, firm flesh. This is extremely good fried chicken, enough reason to visit in itself.

On top of that though, the menu offer a range of variations on an Asian-inspired theme that (somewhat against expectations, I have to admit) compliment the house fry whilst also making the whole lot feel more attractively London, or at least more Kingsland Road. I love chicken with biscuits and gravy, Southern style, but I also love crunchy fried chicken doused in sharp Thai chilli jam, toasted shallots, Thai basil, mint and spring onion. And in this part of town, the light, fresh notes of colourful SE Asian herbs and spices seem a lot more relevant.

And there's absolutely nothing wrong with your bog standard breadcrumbed chicken fillet with sweet mayonnaise in a bun (in fact even modern KFC's version has a certain ersatz charm) but how much better is this beauty, a vast juicy chunk of breast meat with Korean mayonnaise, chilli vinegar and coleslaw? A lot better, I'd say, even at the £10 price point given the huge amount of meat inside.

Salads are many and varied, continuing the Asian theme. Szechuan aubergine had a beguiling mix of spices and chilli oil, texture provided by some striking monochrome sesame seeds. "Yaw bean slaw" was light and fresh and had an addictive miso savouriness, again a twist on a classic that was different not just for the sake of being different. But my favourite was pickled watermelon with peanut and coriander, an astonishing mix of chilli heat and watermelon cool, studded with crunchy peanuts, that hit just about every pleasure point a salad could aim for. Only a broccoli and green bean arrangement seemed out of place - nice enough but a bit soggy and forgettable.

Mostly, though, Chick'n'Sours gets things right. Wines are by (here's that name again) Zeren Wilson, a man who has the ability to conjure up wines of personality and power for a meagre £18 a bottle. The "sours" are lovely sharp fruity cocktails served in half pint glasses, colourful and ice cold and so easy to drink you risk an ice cream headache. Even the fries are good - cooked in beef dripping, aggressively seasoned and just soft enough rather than the cardboard-crunch so many places favour over flavour. Try them dipped in the blue cheese sauce - you'll never want them to end.

Perhaps objectively there isn't anything radically new going on here - fried chicken concepts have come and gone over the years, you can get things like Kara-age in most decent Japanese restaurants (Tonkotsu's is good), similarly Mama Lan's do a good line in crunchy Chinese style wings and for Southern US, Lockhart's is hard to beat. But you don't have to reinvent the wheel to be very good at what you do, and there are enough terrible attempts at even high-end fried chicken (if that's not a contradiction) to demonstrate that getting it right - and certainly getting it so very right as Chick'n'Sours do - is not at all easy.

I loved Chick'n'Sours not because of what it's trying to be but what it is - a relentlessly entertaining, energetic little operation serving near-faultless fried chicken complimented by a range of punchy pan-Asian sides that are never anything less than enormous fun to eat. It has runaway success written all over it.

9/10

There's every chance Chick'n'Sours will appear in the next version of the app. Meantime, see where else is good in Dalston by downloading it here.

Hutong at the Shard, London Bridge

A few weeks ago, after a very nice meal at Elliot's in Borough Market with a friend (you should go, it's great), we decided it would be a good idea to check out Oblix, the bar/restaurant on the 32nd floor of the Shard, for a nightcap. Up we went, expecting it to be pretty busy on a Friday night but still hoping for a quiet corner to stand and sip a cold martini.

What we found, instead, was a piercingly loud space containing too much bar and not enough elbow room, with a good chunk of the place given up to a stage for an irritating jazz band (who also blocked one of the best windows) and warm martinis that cost too much money. We didn't try the food, but by the looks of the plates coming out of the kitchen we weren't missing much; just bland crowd-pleasing international things like fishcakes and Caesar salad, served with ruthless efficiency by willowy Eastern Europeans with nice hair.

In short, Oblix is everything you might expect from a Tall Restaurant. Food that's just good enough, drinks churned out without enough time for the details, but who cares - just look at the view. Hutong, upstairs on the 33rd, could have done exactly that. The restaurants in London's most famous new building were always going to be oversubscribed, and the temptation must have been huge to go for the same undemanding crowd of city boys and tourists with tame, toned-down menus of familiar favourites and watch the cash roll in.

That they haven't is both a surprise and a delight. Anywhere in town, Hutong would be an exciting new place to eat, serving interesting Northern Chinese dishes of confident spicing and immaculate presentation. It's a style of food that has hitherto stubbornly refused to be "poshed up" - Gourmet San and Silk Road may be wonderful places, not to mention great value, but you wouldn't want to know their Scores on the Doors. Hutong has the confidence to do Chinese Fine Dining without toning down or taming any of the things that make this kind of food so special in the first place.

So it's about time I told you about it. Dim sum, gleaming like soft gemstones, were the first things to arrive. My favourite was the prawn dumpling flavoured with rosé champagne, with multicoloured herbs and vegetables inside a translucent casing, but they were all good, and even better dipped in an uncompromisingly hot chilli oil. At £15, this isn't ever likely to compete with your favourite local dim sum on price, but is seriously impressive otherwise.

Next, one of the house signature dishes - roast Peking duck pancakes. The duck is carefully carved tableside into neat rows of crispy skin and moist, seasoned flesh, and is surely up there with the very best to be found in London. It's a strange experience, wrapping up a little parcel of hoi sin, cucumber and spring rolls, as you might have done at any high street Chinese restaurant in any small town in the UK, and yet being rewarded with a taste that is at once comfortingly familiar and strikingly enhanced. This is a superb dish, and at £30 for more than enough for two people, one of the admittedly few items on the menu that could be described as something approaching a bargain.

Sichuan chicken was crispy chunks of moist bird in so much Sichuan pepper it could be used as crowd control. I loved it, the numbing heat, the texture, the colour, but particularly the thought of some suit ordering his usual no. 93 from the local takeaway and being presented with this bowl of fireworks.

Dan dan noodles weren't quite as spicy (it was somewhat of a relief to find out), but impressed nonetheless with their silky texture and soft peanut sauce. By this stage we were incredibly full, so it's only thanks to the fact they were so good that we saw the bottom of the bowl.

As you might expect, Hutong is not a cheap restaurant. There are plenty of other places in town where you can pick up Ma Po tofu and dim sum for a pittance, so don't go to Hutong and start moaning that you're just paying for the view - you really aren't. As much attention has been paid to the stunning interiors (check out those loos), the menu, the drinks (there's a very interesting Chinese-inspired cocktail list which I can also thoroughly recommend) and the friendly and attentive service as the food, and as you can hopefully gather by now, the food is very good indeed. So you pay for it.

And not everything on the menu is as successful as that you see above. Occasionally Hutong's confidence in extreme flavours produces some odd results, like a very bitter raw scallop and pomelo starter I tried on the press preview night, or cold razor clams loaded with so much garlic they make your eyes water.

But I'd still rather suffer the occasional noble failure than spend my money anywhere aiming to be nothing more than adequate, or anywhere content with leaning on the crutch of the location to compensate for food that, at ground level, wouldn't earn a second glance. The achievement at Hutong is that everything is in place for a fantastic night out even before you factor in the view. And watching the sun set over Hampstead on a warm summer's evening as you tuck into your second glass of white, well, that's just a wonderful bonus.

8/10