Uncle Hon's BBQ, Hackney Wick

After traipsing halfway across London, dodging travel works and closed Overground lines and carriages with malfunctioning air conditioning and all the other things that make moving around this city on a weekend in the summer such an endless joy, it's equally annoying to find that your destination is good or bad. If it's good, you will bemoan the fact that somewhere worth visiting is so bloody difficult to get to, and seethe with jealousy of those lucky locals who have such a good place on their doorstep. And if it's bad, you wish you'd spent your Saturday morning and sanity going somewhere else.

Uncle Hon's isn't awful. It's not great, but it's not awful. The brisket (sorry, ox cheeks) was over-tender to the point of mush (it would definitely not pass the competition BBQ "pull-test") and a bit too sweet. Pulled lamb had a decent flavour but a rather uniform texture - the joys of the "pulled" element of a BBQ tray lie almost entirely in finding little crispy crunchy bits of fat and charred flesh; this was just a bit boring. And some cubes of pork belly were decent enough in that Cantonese roast style but was yet more sweet, syrupy, mushy meat next to two other piles of sweet, syrupy, mushy meat and the whole thing was just a bit sickly.

Iberico ribs were a bit better in terms of texture - they did at least have a bit of a bite and didn't just slop off the bone as is depressingly often the case - but I feel like Iberico has become a bit of a meaningless foodie buzzword like Wagyu, ie. nowhere near the guarantee of quality it once was (if indeed it ever was). These were definitely the best things we ate though, and were pretty easily polished off.

Oh I should say pickles and slaw were fine, if fairly unmemorable, and a single piece of crackling weirdly lodged vertically into a mound of rice like the sword in the stone had a pleasant enough greaseless texture but was pretty under seasoned.

Look, I can see what they're trying to do at Uncle Hon's - fusion American/Chinese BBQ food, bringing a bit of a new twist to what is now fairly ubiquitous London drinking-den fare, and with a bit more thought and skill it could have been, well, if not completely worth that awful journey but at least some compensation for your efforts. But after having paid £50pp for what is an only fairly mediocre tray of food plus 3 small extra pork ribs, we were left feeling fairly unhappy, not very satisfied and more than a little ripped off.

5/10

Tarim Uyghur, Bloomsbury

Quite often all you need to know about a restaurant is the smell that greets you as you walk through the door. The smoke and fat of a busy ocakbaşı, The burned onions and masala spices that cling to your clothes after an evening at Tayyabs, the intoxicating mix of funky aged steak and charred lobster shell that fill the upper dining rooms of the Devonshire, these are all indicators enough that you're in for a good time even before you see a menu.

The inside of Tarim Uyghur restaurant on Theobald's Road sent me right back to trips Silk Road in its heyday, when the charcoal grills were sufficiently close to the tables in that tiny space that the smell of scorched lamb fat filled your nostrils and lungs. And this is about a great a compliment as I can give to somewhere specialising in the same kind of regional Chinese food. It smells amazing, the kind of smell that gets you immediately vowing to order whichever the menu items are responsible for it (hint: it's the lamb skewers) and let anything else be a side order.

So let's start with those skewers, which are, needless to say, an absolute must-order. Expertly grilled with touches of salty crunch on the extremities but beautifully tender inside, they come resting on fluffy flatbread to soak up any escaping juices, and two little mounds of spice (don't ask me what they were) for dipping. At £3.95 each they weren't quite the same budget as Silk Road v1, but in terms of form and flavour they were right up there.

Spicy chicken was indeed commendably spicy, consisting of ugly-cute chunks of soft potato and bone-in chicken (I hope I don't create some kind of international incident by noting that Chinese 'butchery' seems to consist of hacking at a carcass with a machete with your eyes closed) soaked in a deep, rich, heavily five-spiced and chillified sauce. Add to this ribbons of thick, home made belt noodles which had a lovely bouncy, tacky texture, and you have an absolute classic northern Chinese dish.

Manti (advertised with a 20min wait but which speeds by if you're distracted by fresh lamb skewers and belt chicken) were also fabulous things, soft but robust and packed full of minced meat ("usually lamb" the menu rather noncommittedly states) and with an addictive vinegar-chilli dip.

But quite unexpectedly given the otherwise quite meaty focus of the menu (I'm not sure I'd bring a vegetarian here), Tarim have quite a way with salads, too. This is lampung, in which giant sticks of wobbly beancurd are topped with pickled carrots, beansprouts and chilli, all soaked in a very wonderful vinegar-soy dressing. I can honestly say I've never had anything like this before, and anywhere that can surprise a jaded diner like me with a new type of salad deserves all the praise it can get.

The bill, for two people, came to just over £42, which although not rock-bottom basement pricing still seems fair given the quality of the food and the area of town (about 5 min walk from Holborn tube). I have noticed the pricing at a lot of Chinese places in Holborn/Bloomsbury creeping up over the past few years - nobody is exempt from food inflation after all - so this is just perhaps the New Normal that we all have to get used to. Instead of spending £12 on your hot lunch, it's now more like £20. Still not bad, though.

So not just because it's 5 minutes' walk from the office, I'm certainly going back to Tarim, to try the chicken wings, the Gosh Nan (fried stuffed flatbread) and perhaps most intriguingly the Uyghur Polo, a rice dish which looks like it comes with some kind of offal. And you know how I love my offal. A charming and exciting ambassador for Xinjiang food, think of Tarim Uyghur as the Silk Road of Central London, a comparison I hope they take as the huge compliment that it's intended to be. Why should Camberwell get all the fun, anyway?

8/10

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

Hainan House, Angel

Hainan is an island off the south coast of China about the size of Vancouver Island - that makes it bigger than Sicily and Sardinia and twice the size of Hawaii, with a population of over 10 million people (more than London). And yet inevitably until last week I'd never heard of it. I make no excuses for this - my knowledge of the geography of China is pretty pathetic, and I should do better, but in a way it's the job (or at least partly the job) of these little regional super-specialist restaurants to draw attention to some of the bewildering variety of Chinese cuisine, much like Silk Road did for Xinjiang and Dream Xi'an and Master Wei did for Shaanxi.

So Hainan cuisine then, or rather Qiong cuisine which is how they describe it on their website, appears to involve quite a bit of poaching of meat instead of the Cantonese/Beijing style crisp-skinned roasts, matched with fragrant fermented herbs and vegetables and the occasional claypot rice dish. Hainanese chicken, for example, is a thing you may have heard of before as it turns up in a certain form on the Din Tai Fung menu and is one of my favourite things to order there. Once you get used to the idea of poached chicken (speaking as someone brought up in Liverpool and didn't have it until I was well into my thirties), it really is a very lovely thing indeed.

Anyway I'm getting ahead of myself. The lunch menu at £13.50 for a main and a side seemed an eminently reasonable place to start, and this is beef Hun - strips of dried beef which had a very interesting collapsey texture (not chewy at all) in a tofu beancurd sauce with lovely big fried tofu puffs adding a bit of gentle crunch. But almost my favourite element were the fermented mustard greens, lovely dark green chunks of pickled brassica which provided another level of punchy flavour.

We tried to share the duties of sides to cover as much of the menu as possible. My own choice was pickled mooli, brilliantly strongly flavoured with that familair pongy (in a good way) turnip-y aroma and very generous in portion size.

Tea eggs were also good, soft and subtly flavoured and although I would have perhaps liked a bit more seasoning, although maybe I'm just thinking of the salted egg you get with ramen and these had a different job to do. They still disappeared quickly enough.

And I didn't get to try any of the braised cabbage, as it got demolished when my back was turned, but by all accounts that was very good too.

Thinking we couldn't come all of this way without trying the famous Hainanese chicken, they kindly let us order a half portion of the poussin off the evening menu, and it didn't disappoint. Served at room temperature to showcase the delicate flavours at their best, every last bit was perfectly tender and perfectly seasoned, and the accompanying chilli-pickled pineapple was wildly addictive. I could have ordered a portion of that on its own. A little bowl of mushroom rice, fluffy and light and moreish, rounded off the savoury courses.

Service was alert and pleasant, but then as we were the only table occupied that Friday lunchtime, it was quite easy to command their attention. I'm hoping it's just a case of the word not getting out just yet about this dynamic little spot on Upper Street, because at prices like these - as I said, £13.50 for a main and a side, and £15 with a drink as well, even with service added on is a bit of a bloody bargain. And for the chance to try a style of Chinese regional food that hitherto hasn't been very visible in the capital, it's worth every penny and more.

Overall, there's really not much to fault about Hainan House. Boldly different, great value and smartly presented, even the hilariously precipitous journey to the loos, involving a crazily inclined staircase in three wildly different proportions, like something from a fairground fun house, just added to the charm. Whether it finds an audience rather depends on Londoners see authentic regional Chinese food coming out of Upper Street - even top ramen peddlers Kanada-Ya took a while to get going a few doors' down, even as people were queueing down the street for the St Giles branch. But, with a bit of luck, and a little time, they should do very well indeed. At least, they very much deserve to.

8/10

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Nanyang Blossom, Knightsbridge

For better or worse, every moment spent eating out in London is an education, and on a warm Tuesday evening last week I went to Knightsbridge to learn about Nanyang cuisine. It has a somewhat fluid definition, as these things often do, but generally refers to food from SE China and surrounding areas that have been under varying degrees of Chinese influence for the last few hundred years. So it's Chinese food with Malaysian, Burmese and Vietnamese on the side, with a bit of Indonesian and Filipino thrown in for good measure. And based on dinner at Nanyang Blossom, very nice it is too.

An amuse of marinated cherry tomatoes was a decent enough palate cleanser, although I'm afraid the tomatoes didn't compare very well with ones I'd been lucky enough to have access to in Spain over the last couple of weeks. This is not really anyone's fault - the Spanish tomatoes are amongst the best in the world, and don't travel very well - but these looked the part at least, and they'd gone to the effort of peeling them so they were fun to eat.

A second brief moan before I get onto the good stuff - a cocktail "Nyonya" was not great. Ostensibly containing both rum and tequila alongside cucumber and chilli, a combination of flavours I can very much get behind, it just tasted of nothing but sugared water and was pretty unpleasant. My photo of it didn't come out, though, so this is "Nanyang Blossom", which I didn't try but was apparently quite good. Despite the rather, er, challenging colour scheme.

Fortunately, from here on things took a dramatic turn for the better. This is a cute little basket of chicken rolls, sort of like spring rolls but I think made just from meat - at least, I didn't detect any pastry. They came with a very interesting - and pleasingly chillified - mustard dipping sauce which added personality and fire to the textures from the chicken rolls.

Prawn toast had a clever way of dealing with the rather grey and unappetising colour the prawn element is when you don't use artificial pink colouring (which the cheap stuff always does) - mix it with bright green seaweed. So with a covering of toasted almonds it looked a bit like some kind of pistachio cake, but on tasting was definitely luxurious and beguiling posh prawn toast, bursting with flavour and a range of addictive textures. This one went down very well.

Chicken satays - made with thighs, which as everyone knows is absolutely the best part of a chicken to grill - had a great texture and the satay sauce was beautifully balanced between sweet and savoury. We also hugely enjoyed some little pickled bits on the side - pineapple and cucumber I think amongst other things - alongside the usual peanut sauce.

Seafood fried rice had huge chunks of tender lobster, octopus and prawn touched with wood smoke from the grill, worth ordering by themselves, but the rice beneath was just extraordinary - fragrant and buttery and soft and everything that the best rice should be. They're pretty generous with the portions at Nanyang (as you might expect for Knightsbridge prices) but there was very little left of this by the end of the evening, it was just so easy to eat. A real standout.

Lemongrass chicken was, like all the other grilled items, supremely well done with nice dark crispy details and topped with a tamarind and mango kerisik - a dry toasted coconut condiment with Malaysian origins. Perhaps compared to the wonderful seafood rice this didn't have quite the punch of flavour but it was still very good.

A new dish on that day (we were told), these prawns came both as oatmeal-crust fritters topped in a (slightly sweet for me) curry sauce, and wok-fried in a cute little prawn cracker basket. It's pleasing to note that Nanyang Blossom are willing to keep swapping dishes in and out as the ingredients and seasonal availability change, suggesting that there will be plenty to engage with on repeat visits.

And finally from the savoury courses, lovely bright baby pak choi in a silky garlic-spiked dressing, a fine ingredient at its absolute best.

I liked some elements of the dessert, and not others. A completely unsweetened (as far as I could tell) rice cake topped with something fiercely gelatenous and bright green felt like something that should have been served with a main rather than as a dessert, and a little matcha (?) ball was equally savoury in style. But the crème brûlée underneath was excellent, with a good smoky crisp sugar topping, and I will be the first to admit that textures and flavour profiles of SE Asian restaurant desserts are not often my style. So there's every chance I'm just being picky.

As I said, eating out in London is an education, and Nanyang Blossom is as good as an introduction to this type of food as you could probably want in the city. Alongside Chinatown's YiQi it is a unashamedly mid- to high- end budget operation serving a pan-Asian menu of imaginative, interesting dishes that you will struggle to find anywhere else, or at least done this proficiently anywhere else. Not everything was absolutely perfect - the cocktails needed a bit of work, for a start - but there was enough surprising and delightful in the savoury courses to make the journey - and outlay (about £120/head including wines if we had been paying) - worth the effort. In this part of town, and with enough curiosity about this kind of food, they should do very well.

7/10

I was invited to Nanyang Blossom and didn't see a bill, but as above expect to pay about £120pp with drinks.

YiQi, Chinatown

As any self-respecting 2024 London restaurant-goer knows, the trend in Asian cuisine is towards regional specification. You're not just Thai, you're Northern Thai/Isarn. You're either selling Tokyo ramen or Sapporo Miso or Kyoto-style Kaiseki. And if you're Chinese, are you Shaanxi or Xinjiang or Sichuan? No of course you can't mix and match. You wouldn't want people to think you don't know what you're doing, do you?

It seems YiQi didn't get that particular memo. Unashamedly - in their words - "Pan Asian", the influences on the menu at this busy little Chinatown spot skit from Indonesia to Thailand to China, with brief stops in Japan and Malaysia along the way. And when they do settle on a style, for example pork with preserved beancurd, they are likely to zhuzh it up with Iberico pork, or elsewhere make use of premium USDA beef. It all has the potential to be a complete and utter mess.

And yet, it isn't. And that's because everything we tried at YiQi, despite or because of the lack of regional coherence, was at least enjoyable and often extraordinary. The kitchen team are, I'm told, ex-Hakkasan and Yauatcha, which means they have a pretty solid track record in making the kind of food London likes to eat (and, it has to be said, at prices to make them wince). And the very first dish to arrive meant serious business - a "Cordyceps" (there's one for the Last of Us fans) flower chicken salad, arriving prettily in a tube of bamboo and tasting of rich chicken and silky mushroom.

Stir fried clams came with the kind of punchy, salty sauce that would have made the telephone directory edible, and we had a great time polishing them off despite the slightly troubling knowledge that had we been paying this small plate of what is usually fairly inexpensive seafood would have cost £20.50. And to be frank, the yuzu-chilli sauce they came with was so powerful, the dish would hardly had been any less enjoyable if it had only contained stir-fried vegetables - the clams were a bit overwhelmed.

Charcoal-grilled chicken wings were at a slightly more normal price point of £13.80 for 6, and had an absolutely superb texture - a good bite inside, and a delicate crunch to the skin. Just touched by the grill enough to give them a good colour without being overwhemingly smoky, they were a short masterclass in how to prepare chicken wings and I enjoyed them very much.

It's worth stressing - again - that all of the food was at least good, and in the case of this bowl of "Hometown Four Kings" vegetable stir, fry, genuinely impressive. I'd never (to my knowledge at least) tried "stink beans" before, pulses the size and shape of broad beans but with an amazing deep vegetal flavour quite unlike anything else, and were a real revelation. In fact the whole dish was extremely good, a thick miso-enhanced (I think) sauce coating pieces of aubergine, green beans and okra (amongst others) which I would consider a must-order if you make your own trip to YiQi.

Whether or not you do head to YiQi of course rather depends on your attitude to their menu pricing. Malay lamb chops were superb - sous-vided to a yielding chew but flame-licked on charcoal to give them colour and texture - and cost £25.80 for four. Maybe complaining about restaurant prices in central London in 2024 is a bit like shouting into a hurricane but I can't help feeling that you don't quite get your money's worth. Plus our menu was stamped ominously with the words "SOFT LAUNCH", hinting that these numbers could eventually creep even higher.

Anyway, look, their restaurant, their rules. They deserve plenty of credit for using the words "Pan Asian" not attached horrifyingly to the word "buffet", and for a genuinely innovative and exciting menu that draws influences from all over the place and still has a certain style and coherence. London certainly could do with a few more spots willing to stick their neck out and do things differently, and I very much wish them the best. This city is a more interesting place to eat thanks to their arrival, and you can't ask for much more than that.

7/10

I was invitied to YiQi and didn't see a bill.

Dream Xi'an, Tower Hill

There are lots of good Chinese restaurants in the Holborn/Bloomsbury area of London. Most seem to have popped up in the last decade or so, I assume alongside an influx of Chinese students attending the many nearby high-profile universities and colleges, because I'm fairly sure when I first started commuting here back in 2006 there wasn't nearly the same wealth of choice. I've tried as many of them as solo lunch break dining allows - JinCheng Alley is excellent, as is Restaurant HE - and I can thoroughly recommend getting a group together for a trip to Happy Lamb, a serious and accomplished hot pot restaurant which still manages to be enormous fun.

But my own personal area favourite is Master Wei, a Xi'an noodle shop just off Queens Square Gardens which despite its enduring (and completely justified) popularity somehow manages to squeeze in any number of walk-ins during those all-important lunch hours. I've been going here for years to enjoy their big bowls of thick biang biang, and have yet to master the art of not getting myself splattered from head to toe in chilli oil before the journey back to the office.

And now, there's a new member of the Wei group to get all excited about. Dream Xi'an sticks to roughly the same formula - dishes largely from China's Shaanxi province (where the owner Guirong Wei hails from), served for not much money - and can be found on the ground floor of a new office block near the Tower of London, putting it right in the catchment area for millions of hungry tourists every year. Tradition dictates that anywhere blessed with heavy footfall that doesn't have to try too hard for custom tends, well, not to try too hard. But it's a pleasure to report that I would thoroughly recommend Dream Xi'an to anyone finding themselves in need of a meal before or after a go on the Tower Bridge Experience or look at the Crown Jewels, and would be worth a journey from further afield as well.

Sesame chicken arrived first, one of many irresistable cold dishes from Northern China (see also beef in chilli oil, and tripe) that even when fairly carelessly thrown together has the ability to do the job but when done properly, as here, seriously impresses. The dressing had a wonderful smoky, umami-rich sesame flavour and a soft, gently clingy texture which coated the chicken beautifully.

Spicy sliced beef had a similarly robust flavour profile but suffered very slightly from rather dry and collapse-y (for want of a better made-up word) beef. The best versions of this dish can boast strips of moist beef that have a decent bite halfway between firm and completely insubstantial and I'm afraid this could have done with a bit more texture. Still, as I said, plenty else to enjoy.

As per the other Wei places, the biang biang noodle game at Dream Xi'an is absolutely on point, and a very strong reason to visit by itself. Arriving tastefully arranged with dainty cubes of pork, bright green pieces of boiled bok choi and a tomato-egg mixture draped on top, it was soon all mixed together and left for us to demolish in the most efficient and/or most disastrously messy way we could come up with. Part of the issue (he says, trying to excuse the utter carnage he left behind in Tower Hill that evening) is that biang biang noodles, with a plural 's', is a bit of a misnomer - usually what arrives is one giant thick noodle nestling amongst the other ingredients, and so it's essentially impossible to grab a bitesize portion without either clumsily attempting to rip it apart with chopstiks or gnaw chunks apart with your teeth. However you manage it though, and I'm sure you'll do a better job than me, you're rewarded with thick, bouncy fresh noodles with a lovely bite.

Wontons with chilli did their job perfectly, yet more fantastic fresh noodle work in silky, slippery chilli oil. Perhaps more familiar than the other more specialist regional dishes, these were still worth the order and would have disappeared in record time if they weren't so hard to grab hold of.

Only the Xiaolong Bao were perhaps the one dish I wouldn't order again. Instead of a delicate, translucent dumpling encasing liquid broth these were bready and solid, with no soupy insides at all. Whether this was a mistake, or some deliberate regional variation I'm sure I don't have the experience to determine, but either way they didn't do much for me at all.

Overall, though, Dream Xi'an works thanks to the fact they do a number of things very well indeed, and don't charge the earth for any of it. True, where at one time regional Chinese food could claim to be one of the great food bargains of London it's now more of a mid-range treat, and a spend per head with a couple of bottles of Tsingtao could edge towards £30. But we are right in the middle of Tourist London, and these are lovingly handmade dishes of fresh hand-pulled noodles and authentic regional Chinese heritage, and £30 is still an insanely reasonable amount to pay for dinner.

More than anything, I'm just happy that it's ever increasing areas of central London, and not just the suburbs which have been able to boast about places like Silk Road and Dragon Castle for ages now, are blessed with fantastic Chinese food. I note there's a new branch of Master Wei in Hammersmith, and of course Dream Xi'an itself is unofficially the 2nd branch of Xi'an Impressions which has been feeding the post-soccer crowd at the Emirates stadium for over a decade. The slow march of specialist, regional Chinese cuisine across the capital is the happy result of a demanding immigrant population no longer content to put up with less than the quality they could get back home, and increasingly open-minded Londoners who have tried biang-biang and sesame chicken and know damn sure they want more of it. And you can count me amongst that number.

8/10

I was invited to Dream Xi'an and didn't see a bill, though as I mention above what we ate would have come to about £30pp.