Leong's Legend in Chinatown

My dou miao

Braised red pork Pork ribs

Name Leong's Legends
Address 26-27 Lisle Street, Chinatown, WC2H 7BA
Phone 020 7734 3380
Web site N/a
Main dish price range £8-12
Rating 4-stars
Recommended dishes Braised pork

Intrigued by the reports of good food and awful service, I've been meaning to check out Leong's Legend for some time now. The reviews have been decidedly mixed, and I've been intending to sort it out.

I've heard this was a good place to get a decent authentic Taiwanese meal, and so when we were seated in the small and crowded dining room I was surprised to see a undistinguished menu, headed by that classic Chinese dish "Crispy Aromatic Duck" (n.b. this dish does not exist outside England, let alone in China). Oh well. I picked out whatever looked not totally awful from this menu, and placed my order.

I speak a little Chinese, enough to be able to ask the waiter if they had "dou miao" , one of my favorite chinese vegetables (a kind of pea sprouts). The waiter, upon hearing my attempt at Chinese, said "Ah, you speak Chinese! Here, I must get you the Chinese Menu. He scurried away and produced a new set of menus. These menus, while written in both Chinese and English, were clearly "Chinese" in that they were designed to be offered to Chinese People. The menu was totally different, full this time of classic Chinese and Taiwanese dishes, enough to warm my heart.

I ordered a spicy braised red pork dish, in the Northern Chinese style, at the waiters recommendations. I also got my dou miao, as well as a tasty fried pork spareribs dish. It was all damn good, and the pork braise was as it should be, hot as hell.

This was not Chinese Haute Cuisine, but it was great to have a solid Chinese meal for a change -- I heartily recommend Leong's -- just be sure to ask for the right menu.

Baozi Inn in Chinatown

Name Baozi Inn

Address 25 Newport Ct, London, WC2H 7JS
Phone 020 72876877
Web site http://www.madhusonline.com/
Main dish price range £5-9
Rating 3 Stars. Go there, you won't be disappointed.
Recommended dishes La mian, Sichuan noodles, Giant Baozi

I remember many years ago, as an exchange student on my first poorly-founded attempt to live in the UK, I ducked into a joint in Chinatown for a quick, cheap dinner. I remember the meal as being not that good. This is notable because back then, I probably had no idea at all what a good Chinese meal actually was. Fast forward, oh, 10 years to today. I've lived in Asia, I've eaten Chinese food in the best white-table cloth establishments in Hong Kong and the finest dumpling dives in Beijing. Hell, I've eaten La Mian in Lanzhou. In Lanzhou! Which was rated by the World Bank as the worst city in the world, but is still famous forgiving the world pulled noodles, called La Mien (or in Japanese: Ramen). After gaining all that knowledge, I returned to Chinatown to get another quick, cheap meal. The result: not that bad!

Baozi Inn, in the heart of Chinatown, is part of a new wave of restaurants taking over from the older generation of greasy cantonese joints. Chinatown has for 30 years been at the epicenter of London's formidable tourist circuit, and so has always catered to tourists. The older restaurants were greared to filling the tasteless westerners such as myself, the new restaurants seem to serve mostly the masses of Chinese and Asian tourists that now appear. The improvement is great.

Baozi Inn styles itself as being a "northern chinese" restaurant. Which means they sell noodles and dumplings, the flour-based products indigenous to the Chinese North. But noodles spread all over china, most notably to the southern province of Sichuan; and Baozi Inn serves those noodles too.

The appealingly brief menu sports a variety of noodle dishes, as well as a few rice dishes and sides I haven't tried. The baozi (dumpling) selection is pretty sparse, considering the name of the place. The food, on balance, is quite good. It's flavorful and light. The latter is actually a strike against its authenticity, since any noodle joint in China would never get a single customer if the soup was served with a nice layer of grease across the top.

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I've been here twice, which is an accolade I can give to only two other London restaurants (Ran and Madhu's). It's good. Go there if you're in the area. You won't be disappointed.

Pork Dumplings in Spicy Sauce