Gourmet San: Almost-There Sichuan Food in Bethnal Green

Name Gourmet San

Address  261 Bethnal Green Rd, London, UK E2 6AH
Phone 020 7613 1366
Web site none
Main dish price range £6-£14
Rating 4 stars.  Almost a masterpiece. 
Recommended dishes Stir Fried Aubergine with Spiced Chili Sauce

Gourmet San-- a tiny, Sichuan Chinese  restaurant in a the very not-central neighborhood of Bethnal Green--- quite improbably has one thing weighing heavily in its favor: Buzz, and LOTS of it.  The Guardian food critic has mooned over it.  An article in the Evening Standard said members of the "nose to tail set" and semi-celebrity chef Jacob Kenedy count as regulars.  All that sounded like mouth watering to me.  Never a fan of goopy, corn starchy Chinese food, I consider dry-fried, Sichuan food to be my drug of choice-- and I'd been feigning for it recently.  Bar Shu, the only other Sichuan restaurant we'd tried in London, so underwhelmed me and Nick (and was so expensive) we deemed it not even worthy of the time it would take to write it up. 

Spoils:  BBQ Lamb Skewer & Chicken with Chili Sauce in Chong Qin Style. 

When we rolled up on a recent Saturday evening, Nick and I were immediately felt our spirits lift. Like our favorite hole-in-the-wall ethnic haunts back home-- where the focus is on the food, not the decor--  Gourmet San is definitely low frills, a Spartan cousin to the decadent, red-tapestry draped atmosphere at Bar Shu.  The crowd also felt pitch perfect: About half the clientele on the evening we visited were Chinese, with trendy, young Shoreditchers making up the difference.

We  took a seat at a white, paper-covered table and quickly dived in by ordering one of the BBQ Lamb Skewers, which seemed to be a very popular item among the crowd the night we visited, with plates of them gracing nearly every table. At £1 a piece, the relatively simple skewers had a nice meaty taste, without being loaded with the cheap, cooking-oil flavor that can mar a lot of low-cost meat kebabs. Still, without the dry, spicy taste that true Sichuan enthusiasts love, we were ready to try the real stuff. 

The delectable Dry Fried String Beans with Mince Pork and Chili.

The first main dish we tackled: the Dry Fried Green Beans with Mince Pork and Chili (£6). This is a dish I've always loved at Sichuan joints, so I was excited when I saw it listed here as a "Chef Special"-- and it definitely didn't disappoint.  It had the perfect, dry-fried smokey flavor, and the bits of pork were excellent-- lightly fried and not so fatty as to overwhelm the dish. Peppercorns were also hidden throughout the stack of greens, adding a nice bit of grit between the teeth and adding the perfect, Sichuan taste. (Read: My mouth tingled with the familiar, loving numbness only Sichuan peppercorns can provide.) 

Things were slightly less impressive with another old-standard favorite of ours: Chicken in Chili Sauce Chong Qin Style (£8). For those unfamiliar with this stroke of Chinese culinary genius, this dish, from the town of Geleshan, China, is made by frying small nuggets of meat in a wok stacked high with a mountain of dried, red chilis, and supplemented with garlic, scallions, and peppercorns. When done well in the kitchen-- something Nick and I learned how to do reading Brit cookbook writer Fuschia Dunlop-- the chili-infused oil in the wok coats the rich chicken, infusing its with spicy moisture. Here, sadly, the chicken was too fried and dry for our tastes, and the ratio of chilis to chicken felt miscalibrated.  Instead of combing through the chilis to find the meat-- some restaurants literally nickname this dish "hunt and peck chicken" for that reason-- the meat was all clearly visible in this London version, perhaps a nod to the famed British aversion to spice.  

Brits call it aubergine, Americans call it eggplant.  I call it delicious!

The real masterpiece of the evening, however, came from an unexpected dish : The Stir Fried Aubergine with Spiced Chili Sauce (£7).  This eggplant/aubergine entree was bathed in mouth watering chili oil that achieved the perfect degree of reach-for-the-beer-glass kick.  And the chili-infused aubergines were so gooey and rich they seemed to coat our mouths, melting on our tongues as we ate them.  Nick and I talked it over after enthusiastically gobbling up every last bite and agreed this dish was quite possibly the best Asian aubergine dish we'd ever had-- a statement we don't make lightly. 


All in all, Nick and I felt excited about Gourmet San, which definitely showed some real flashes of genius.  I'm not quite ready to order it as takeout twice a week yet-- and yes, we did do that with our favorite local Sichuanese place in New York-- but I'm definitely eager to explore more of the menu. And if I change my mind, there's good news: The restaurant's delivery staff miraculously delivers all the way to Angel. 

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.

Min Jiang in Kensington

Table-side Duck Carving!

Name Min Jiang
Address Royal Garden Hotel, 2-24 Kensington High Street, London W8 4PT
Phone 020 7361 1988
Web site http://www.minjiang.co.uk/
Main dish price range £20-50
Rating 4 Stars. Go there, it's really good.
Recommended dishes Peking Duck, Xiao Long Bao

Chinese food has come a long way in the capital, as we have written. The limp old ducks hanging in the windows of Chinatown have been replaced with eager Chinese tourists, slurping down soup noodles which pass their stringent authenticity tests. As we've written before, Chinatown has gotten better, a lot better, and better still, it's still cheap and cheerful.

But Chinese food, one of the world's great cuisines, certainly can go up-market. Chinese cities today are alive with high-priced, high-experience restaurants, built into elegant spaceswhere skilful waiters glide around with trays of exquisitely crafted dishes. I'm not talking about the trendy Shanghai joints with loud music, beautiful clientele, and fumbling drug-soaked management -- I'm thinking of a few Beijing places I've been to, artfully set into old courtyard houses, filled with people-who-would-know a good dish when they see one.

In London, we have had a few expensive Chinese places, but most of these have been of the stylish variety, with the focus on the scene, not the food. Now we have one of the latter variety.
Enter Min Jiang. It's far from unpleasant, and not at all stodgy, just a little understated. The setting, on the top floor of the Garden Palace hotel, is actually one of the best of any restaurant I've seen -- fantastic views of Hyde Park to the east make it a perfect high-end lunch spot.

The food, I must say, was excellent. We opted to wait it out for a Peking Duck, which took the full 45 minutes we were told it would (it's possible to order ahead). When it came, it was quite worth it -- undermining my theory that Peking Duck is never good in restaurants that specialize in it. It was carved at our table side, and served sliced with thin flour pancakes and a variety of toppings beyond the usual hoisin and scallions. The skin, carved off to be eaten with sugar as a appetizer, was excellent.

I was also quite impressed with the xiao long bao, or soup dumplings, to the point where I re-ordered them. Soup dumplings are classic Shanghai cusisine, and Peking Duck, is of course, from Peking (Beijing) -- so Min Jiang is not true to a specific regional cuisine. This is unfortunate, since the Chinese cuisines do vary quite a lot and consistency is important to their enjoyments (imagine a meal of German wienerschnitzel paired with a Sicilian Caponata). I suppose this can be forgiven in a city with a dearth of high-end Chinese of any description.

The only real downside is the price, which like everything in London was too much. £50 for duck is a lot, even for a good one. And any one familiar with the very decent dim sun joints of California or New York will find the cost of a meal at Min Jiang absurd -- £6.50 for THREE xiao long bao?? It should be a quarter that. But no bother -- for a very occasional treat.

On a Friday four months after opening, Min Jiang was about half-full. It has the same owners as the hotel which occupies it (a family from Hong Kong), so perhaps it can survive some slackness. I certainly hope it can, because it is a great addition to the culinary scene.

(Pictures stolen from kind people on Flickr.)

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