Xu, Chinatown

Trishna, Gymkhana, Hoppers, Bubbledogs, Kitchen Table, Lyle's, Bao. If at least one of those restaurants isn't in your top 5 in London then you almost certainly haven't eaten at them yet, and in fact I'd go further - there will be a number of committed foodies in the capital whose top five spots are all taken by members of the above list. The JKS group is known not just for the astonishing quality of the places they manage but for the sheer variety, running from smart Indian to Sri Lankan via seasonal fine dining and Taiwanese street food. Everything they turn their hand to is in some way notable, unique and brilliant.

They are, in short, some of the finest restaurateurs the city has ever known. The closest contemporary comparison is Alan Yau, who also instinctively "got" what people wanted from a restaurant and had pockets deep enough to make his visions a reality, but there was always a sense, particularly at lower-end concepts like Busaba Eathai but also at flagship Hakkasan and certainly at latest Soho "Chinese gastropub" Duck and Rice that atmosphere and attitude came first, and food (an often distant) second.

Not so with JKS, and certainly not at Xu, where a gloriously opulent interior, all dark carved woods and plush, intimate booths, is merely the perfect setting for some of the most exciting and inventive Chinese/Taiwanese food to ever hit the capital. I'm intensely aware I'm on very shaky ground talking details, as my knowledge of high-end Taiwanese cuisine is only slightly more developed than my understanding of the rules of American Football, but I know good food when I taste it and this "tomato and smoked eel" was great, the soft cubes of fish sharpened by a commendably punchy tomato/chilli sauce, topped with crisp daikon for extra crunch.

Girolles vermicelli was no less interesting for being the vegetarian option, containing a well-seasoned mound of fresh mushies and nice defined glass noodles. I think there were squares of something else in there too - perhaps egg, although don't quote me on that. Look, I did warn you I wouldn't do very well with the descriptions.

The beef in "Numbing beef tendon" was sliced into neat flat circles, covered in Sichuan peppercorn-spiked chilli oil, and topped with various herbs and finely chopped spring onions. At its heart this was a smartened-up version of the "sliced beef in chilli oil" you may have enjoyed in your favourite Sichuan restaurant, only more subtle, more attractive and that much more rewarding.

Between the starters and mains we snuck in a snack from the main menu, "Xian Bing", pastry puffs containing robustly-flavoured pucks of aged pork and accompanied by a saucer of quite lovely vinegar. One of the highlights of a meal at Bao in the early days was a dressing of aged white soy sauce that came with the beef rump cap, and it's clear their attention to detail to sauces has been carried over to Xu. In fact, the sense of every element of every dish having been lovingly crafted and tested to perfection will be familiar to anyone who's ever eaten at Bao.

The only main that didn't completely knock us over was the seabass, so let's start with that. Though cooked perfectly, and certainly a generous portion, there was something surprisingly one-note and - dare I say it - boring about the dressing, both the inoffensive coriander (presumably) side and the sledgehammer punch of the chilli side, most of which we ended up scraping off. Still, as I say, the fish was good, and was all eaten.

Much better was Mapo Tofu, set in a thick, silky layer and dressed with a rich concoction of herbs, greens and spices. Though onstensibly the "vegetarian option", there was absolutely no sense that this dish compromised anything of the punch and power of the meaty dishes; in fact it made a case for being the best dish overall.

Well, perhaps apart from the beef. Oh lordy, the beef. I have to admit to a twinge of disappointment when this dish was placed on the table, as it looked quite far from the immaculately manicured row of sliced cow I'd been led to expect from press releases, and indeed the art on their own website. But that disappointment lasted no longer than the moment I placed one in my mouth. With a delicate crust from the grill, and a meltingly tender flesh blessed with just the right amount of aged funk, this was a supreme bit of beef cooking, impressive at any price point never mind as part of a £20 pre-theatre menu. Whoever their supplier is (I wouldn't be surprised if it's Warrens who they worked with at Bao), they should be very pleased indeed that their product has been given such a glorious showcase.

Desserts continued the theme of exhausting attention to detail at a seriously reasonable price point. "Ma Lai Cake" is a delicate sponge, steamed to order to a beautiful golden dome, alongside two cute pots of condensed milk and orange-spiked butterscotch. Perhaps these are eaten after every dinner in Taiwan, but I'd not seen one before and was delighted.

And it would be easy to raise your eyebrows at the fact that Xu don't make their own ice cream, until you learn that they get theirs from Gelupo Gelato from just around the corner, who make what most consider the best in the capital. Topped with a dense, salty slick of black sesame, this was a clean, clever and beautiful thing.

So yes, of course I loved it. I loved it the moment I walked through the door, through every carefully-considered, intelligently-constructed dish of fire and flavour, and I loved the bill at the end which at £42 a head with plenty to eat and drink is about as close to a bargain as you're going to find in central London these days. No, not everything was perfect, but even the bits I wouldn't order again were clearly made for the right reasons, and could have easily been someone else's favourites.

Another JKS restaurant, another triumph then. It would almost be possible to take umbrage at these irritating over-achievers, with each new venture better than the last and gathering armfuls of awards and accolades as they go. But for birthdays at Trishna, family meals at Gymkhana, drunken evenings at Bubbledogs and happy long lunches perched at the bar at Bao, I feel I owe these people so much of what I've enjoyed about eating out in London over the last decade, and I have nothing but gratitude for their considerable accomplishments. And now there's Xu, just the latest in a long list of reasons why London is safe in their hands.

9/10

Bao, Fitzrovia

I have a rule that I only write about one restaurant in a group. Generally, no matter how accomplished the second or third branch is, with so many of the same dishes appearing and very often so many of the same staff being involved in all sites, there just isn't enough new material to cover. For example, all Patty & Bun are good; all Tonkotsu are good; all Wright Bros are good. All Hawksmoor and Goodman are good (man). But despite the odd variation in the menu they're all good because they have a certain core set of dishes they can produce consistently and to a high standard, and that doesn't make for particularly interesting copy.

But sometimes, rules are there to be broken. Sometimes a restaurant group comes along so profoundly different to everything that has come before, so groundbreaking in its approach to the business of eating out, that if they opened a hundred branches serving exactly the same menu I would still find enough new things to say about them in a hundred new blog posts. This has only happened twice in my time living in London. First was the Meatwagon/MeatEasy/MeatLiquor family tree, each stage of which along the way to national domination I covered with ecstatic burger-geek glee because it really was that important - an obsessive knowledge of what makes a good burger, matched with an irresistible funky dive-bar aesthetic and bolshy attitude. MeatLiquor, even its detractors must acknowledge, changed absolutely everything.

And now, there's Bao. I'm not about to make any grand predictions about how influential this pair of cool-as-a-cucumber Taiwanese snack bars will end up being; that's not my job, nor even, at this stage, is it important. But I can tell you that I feel the same about the two branches of Bao as I did about MeatWagon all those years ago - that this is a supremely talented bunch of people with the means to do exactly what they want to do, and a meal there is an experience so utterly and consistently rewarding that if it's not one of your favourite restaurants in London you haven't eaten there yet, simple as that.

The joy of Bao isn't just about the food - these things never are. The clean, modernist lines of the interiors of both branches compliment the exact, unfussy dishes served in them, to the extent that the whole operation - certainly including the smiley staff in their clean white labcoats - feels like a kind of experimental art project. I'm sure things like the "chicken chop with soy cured egg" or "beef cheek and tendon nuggets" would still taste great served under a motorway sliproad, but in these zen-like spaces they really shine.

There is not a single item on the Bao menu that you wouldn't want to eat over and over again until you did yourself an injury, so choosing a lunch for one is pure torture. I'd recommend going with at least one friend, so you can put the little mark in as many boxes on the menu as possible (the Bao ordering system is a little paper form and a pencil, meaning you can keep track of what you've ordered and - more importantly - add to it again and again when you realise what a great time you're having). But most people will probably start with the titular Bao, fluffy little bright-white rice flour buns filled with, alternatively, softly sweet pork belly, beef shortrib, umami-rich blackened cod and a nugget of breadcrumbed daikon which makes about as good a case for the vegetarian option as you could possibly imagine.

In any other restaurant I'd describe "Cep broth, duck breast" as a "must order" except such advice is going to be useless at Bao when everything is brilliant. It is an astonishingly lovely thing though, a salty, earthy mushroom consommé matched with a couple of slices of pink, gamey duck breast, and to miss out on it would be a terrible crime.

Similarly this salad of raw prawn and potato, which is full of surprising colours and textures and seasoned precisely enough that each element presented at its absolute best. I'm not normally a fan of raw prawn, so for me to want to polish off a second plate of this as soon as the first had disappeared is a real achievement.

I can't imagine a situation when you wouldn't want to order this dish of soy-cured pork loin with ginger and chives, either. Beautifully soft and sweet slices of pork, soaked in a gentle soy dressing, it's as blissful to eat as it is attractive to look upon. Another must-order.

Of course, it goes without saying that you can't eat at Bao without trying the fried chicken, one of the few non-Bao items carried over from the Soho menu. A generous supreme of chicken in a glorious bubbly crust, it comes with a remarkable cured egg yolk which acts as a kind of innovative dipping sauce. Whether this is a Taiwanese staple I was hitherto unaware of or whether this was entirely Bao's idea, it's still a very special thing.

Pork "bak kwa" turned out to be three, faintly transluscent geometrically-exact squares of dry-cured pork, served with a fruity chilli dipping sauce. Now, there may be some people out there - members of certain religions perhaps, or the terminally insane - who for whatever reason cannot enjoy squares of sweet-salty cured pork dipped in chilli sauce, but I am certainly not one of them. And so this dish is, also, unmissable.

Even the drinks are borne of true invention and an attention to detail bordering on exhausting. This pretty thing, the "Yakult float", is I think a yuzu mixture topped with a yoghurt mousse squirted out of one of those cheffy squirty canister things (no I don't know what they're called), and feels like it's doing you good as well as tasting great. So you definitely have to order that, too.

Do you really need any more reasons to visit? How about the "crispy cabbage", a brittle leaf of fried greenery with a smooth-as-silk cream dipping sauce, which explodes in the mouth with salt and vegetal flavour. Can you imagine a world in which you went for a meal at Bao and didn't order the crispy cabbage? Could you look your friends in the eye afterwards? Could you learn to live with yourself? No, thought not.

So. If everything is brilliant, as I've said (which it is), then how on earth do you choose what to order? I have no easy answer to that, except to say that in the long run it won't be a problem because I can't see anyone just visiting Bao once. This is a restaurant to worship and obsess over. Its food, unique to this location and so completely unlike anywhere else, is, without exaggeration, something approaching perfect in almost every regard, from quality of ingredients to refinement of presentation. Service is unfailingly warm and attentive, and you enjoy all this in a dining room so beautiful if it were emptied of bars, stools and customers it could be used as an art gallery.

In short, restaurants like this do not come along very often. If I'm right (and I'm usually not), then it's just a matter of time before London goes Bao-mad. It may be copied, parodied or ripped-off. Somewhere called Bun or Boa will open in Soho serving slightly wonky versions of the famous Bao dishes. There will be the inevitable backlash as people too important to queue (pro-tip: you can book downstairs at Fitzrovia) dismiss it all as a stupid hipster fad and pretend they prefer Wagamama. All these things may happen. But there will always be the original and best, doing its thing so well, being brilliant again and again.

10/10

You may notice a couple of items on my first visit were comped - that was very kind of them, so I just left an extra big tip instead. I think they deserve it, don't you?

Bao, Soho

A reliable feature of the very best restaurants is when you first glance at the menu and want to order every single last thing. Perhaps only at Lockhart, in recent memory, have I seen a menu so comprehensively attractive as that at Bao, whose expertly-pitched offerings of Taiwanese appetisers and steamed buns, paired with a short list of interesting beers, ciders and sake, contains absolutely no filler, no token vegetarian options or timid crowdpleasing carbohydrates. It is a love letter to food, or perhaps more specifically a love letter to foodies - pig blood cake, trotter nuggets, eryngii mushroom with century egg, guinea fowl Chi Shiang rice; bold and brilliant, flattering its audience with unusual ingredients and daring you to try something new.

Unlike the Lockhart, though, where to satisfy your desire to try the whole menu you'd need a party of at least 8, at Bao the dishes are so keenly priced and the portion sizes so sensible that just two people could almost work their way through the whole lot. I didn't quite - sadly - manage this last night but it's only a matter of time before I do, because believe me, this isn't the kind of place you visit just once.

Ordering is done via putting numbers next to a little printout of the menu, "like in Argos" as my friend pointed out. This means that if you're in a rush and want to order everything at once you can, or if you want to split up your meal into stages you can just come back and order more later. It's a good system. We started with eryngii mushroom with century egg, wich punched way above its weight with a rich umami hit of soy and mushroom, the chunks of jellied egg filling out the flavour and texture. This remained one of our favourite dishes of the night, and not just because (well, at least not only because) we were so ravenously hungry when it arrived.

Next, a huge meaty scallop in yellow bean garlic sauce. Perfectly cooked with a lovely golden crust yet just-so inside, it was clearly a very high quality bit of seafood, treated very well. But the yellow bean sauce was a revelation - distantly familiar from Chinese takeaways past, yet luxurious and refined. It had a marvellous smoky, silky texture and really enhanced the seafood.

Not for Bao anything as humdrum as fried potato. Sweet potato chips were best described as tempura, with a light white batter on each neat little stick of vegetable, and dressed with a soft, fruity 'plum pickle salt'.

You'd expect the buns themselves, which after all made Bao their enviable name on the street food scene, to be worth the trip alone. My own "classic" was every bit as good as I remember from Kerb at the Bussey building in Peckham, and all the better in fact for not having to eat them standing up with a on open bottle of beer in my shirt pocket.

And I didn't get to try the vegetarian daikon option but from what I can gather, that was pretty bloody impressive too. In fact I'm told that the daikon bun is their best seller so far. I'll just have to go back and see what the fuss is about.

40-day aged rump cap from Warrens butchers in Cornwall (the very best butchers in the country, in case you hadn't heard of them) was never likely to disappoint. But dressed in a special aged white soy sauce imported specially from Taiwan, it was lifted onto another level, the fat from the beef combining with soy to produce a particularly astonishing flavour. Describing exactly why the effect was so impressive may be beyond me, but it was as if the soy made the beef more beefy, highlighting yet refining all of the funky notes from the meat.

Aubergine, served with wonton had a great spicy flavour but there's something about the texture of aubergine that I find a bit disorienting. Still, the wontons were fun and it was at least something I'd not had before.

Desserts were no kind of afterthought. Peanut milk was a refreshing shot of, well, peanutty milk, a bit like the bottom of a bowl of Crunchy Nut Cornflakes but absolutely non the worse for that.

And Fried Horlicks ice cream bao? Gorgeous smooth, malty ice cream inside what if I didn't know better I would assume to be a kind of doughnut/brioche hybrid but was - I'm told - some kind of fried version of the normal steamed bao buns. Very clever stuff, either way - another highlight amongst highlights.

We had two beers each, three authentically-inoffensive Taiwan beers and one from Austria just to see what the difference was. Objectively the Austrian beer was better, but weirdly the more bland Taiwan style worked better with the food. I'm sure that was entirely deliberate.

Service was never less than brilliant but there did seem to be more than enough staff for the tiny room. Our seat at the bar gave us the opportunity to engage with the guy serving up sake in little metal teapots and made it incredibly easy to set our own pace through the menu. Maybe if you were sat on a bench near the kitchen or next to the loos you wouldn't think the room was quite so comfortable, but for £30 a head for such creative and exciting food that is largely unique in the capital, I'd put up with far worse.

The only niggling worry is that Bao is already looking like it may be a victim of its own success. Last night, on opening night no less, the queue stretched down the street. So space at this bright and bold little spot on Lexington Street may always be as rare as guinea fowl teeth. But surely - surely you're used to this kind of thing by now. Get there early, and get there soon. Bao is an absolute cracker.

9/10

Beaten by the queues at Bao and want to know where else is good? Where to Eat London 2015, my guide to only the very best restaurants London has to offer, is available on the App Store right now for £2.99. Photos by Hannah.