Ooh, I was excited. I’d been in the Isle of Wight for a while, scoffing down crabs and lobsters caught to order for us by a chap who’s been harvesting crustaceans for my girlfriend’s family since the days when men and lobsters were still close relatives (as they still are in some of the remoter villages on the Yarmouth side), and revelling in the long blustery beach walks and soul-settling silence of the seaside, when I peeled open a national newspaper and read a review of a new Chinese restaurant in Soho.
Which meant I had to go home. I can stay away from London only for as long as I can not think about Chinese food. When I lived in Paris there were times when if you’d offered me another sautéd lobe of foie gras I’d have poked it up your nose and held it there until you promised to bring me something Chinese by nightfall. A soup, a bicycle, anything.
And this one, Bar Shu, sounded a corker. It was Sichuanese, which is a rarity, in fact, I think, a uniquity, in London (though not in Melbourne, Chicago or Sichuan) and the write-up throbbed with an almost erotic enthusiasm.
An hour or so later I booked a table for four from my seat on the London train and then invited my friends Jermaine and Nikki to join us for what I promised would be one of the restaurant experiences of the year. (They’re not actually called Jermaine and Nikki, they’re called Henry and Jemima, but you’d have thought I was making it up – just like you suspect I can’t really be called Giles.)
Over a pre-prandial drink a couple of streets away from our destination, Jermaine, himself a restaurateur, said, “Bar Shu? You mean that place on the corner of Frith Street? I ate there last week with Jacko [actually he said “Pierre”]. I didn’t think it was anything special.”
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And as if that wasn’t deflating enough, Nikki then declared, “It’s Chinese? Oh. I hate Chinese. I don’t think I’ve ever had a nice Chinese meal in my life.”
How’s that for gratitude? Rupert Murdoch works his fingers to the bone to pay for Jermaine and Nikki’s dinner, and this is how they respond. Personally, I don’t think I’ve ever had a truly nice meal in my life that wasn’t Chinese. So there.
From the outside, Bar Shu appeared to be popular with Chinese people, which white people often take as a great recommendation of a Chinese restaurant. Though I don’t see why. I have eaten in dozens of restaurants in China where every single diner was Chinese apart from me, and the food was terrible.
After a quick glance at the upstairs dining room, which was plain and stuffed with whiteys (because Chinese restaurateurs, well aware that white people like to see Chinese people eating, always parade them in the ground-floor window-seats and then cram the gullible honkys in the crap seats by the kitchen), we grabbed a table downstairs, where the decor is Orientalist but not cheesy.
The menus are plastic affairs with photos of the dishes – just as you get in China – and bar no holds in the area of dish-naming. We opened up, for example, with the “exploded kidney flower”, which may sound like a cross between a Native American princess and something terrible they found in one of George Best’s last X-rays, but was a beautifully dense, rich offal dish. The girls didn’t touch it, of course.
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Nor could Jermaine and I be prevented from ordering the “Husband and Wife Offal”, which is presumably a euphemism for some sort of marriage-bed caper viewed close-up from a very intimate angle, but on the plate turned out to be slices of cold tripe and other gastric paraphernalia. Jermaine revelled in holding up the big porous flakes of pig stomach and saying, “Look, you can see where all the tubes were going backwards and forwards when it was alive.” We told the girls they were missing a real treat. But we were lying.
Another dish, whose name escapes me (I’ll try “900-year-old dungbeetle-style crazy tripe mobile”, but it’s probably just called something silly), was warm strips of tripe with vegetables and was very good indeed. High and sticky without being too pooey. The girls didn’t fancy it.
We also ordered the “pickles with meat”, whose small print promised “pig’s trotter, chicken’s feet and wings”. But the dish they brought us featured only the bird toes. A lot of boiled, unseasoned, very yellow metatarsal. When we objected, the head waiter admitted that they had run out of wings and trotters, which was a poor show, we thought, and we sent it back.
The girls had some twice-cooked pork which was a little dry but essentially well done – reminiscent of the braised pork dishes at Yming, just round the corner, or the “pork belly in the poet’s style” at ECapital on Gerrard Street.
And then we had the “tongue-numbing beef” and things went a little weird. This was chipped beef marinated since before I was born in Sichuan pepper and something sweet, so that it was very hard and chewy, like biltong almost, and did crazy, crazy, things to us.
When it first goes into your mouth you think, “Ooh, that’s a bit hot.” And then you think, “That’s very, very hot,” and then you think, “Hang on, no it’s not, it’s just sort of aniseedy.”
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And then you swallow, and look around you, and then your tongue goes numb. And you giggle at the literalness of it. It’s an odd numbness, like one imagines Kojak’s tongue might feel after testing the white powder which the man with the Afro and the Rupert Bear trousers claims is sugar, as he did in, I think I am right in saying, every single episode of Kojak.
And then it goes cold, your tongue, and then it runs with water. And it feels not unlike, one imagines, the effect of Ecstasy might have been back in the late Eighties when, I gather, a pill was really a pill.
And then come the giggles again. And then the awed silence. And then the moment of astounding clarity.
My friends, this was some serious shit.
Jermaine called for peppercorns from the kitchen and they brought them on a plate. We cracked the soft husks and chewed the hard kernels. Giggles, hot mouth, cold mouth, running-water mouth, tingly face, giggles, silence, clarity. And then another peppercorn.
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By the time the main course arrived we were on a bit of a downer. Which may be why the much-vaunted Sichuan hot-pot was a bit of a disappointment. Or maybe it was because I’m a bit fussy about my meat. The two big rectangular trays of bubbling oily liquid, provided for us to cook our choice of ingredients, were jolly enough. But it was quite hard finding something one wanted to cook in them.
I asked if the chicken was free-range (I know that sounds naive but there really isn’t any reason why it shouldn’t be just because a place is Chinese – the dishes here aren’t cheap), and it wasn’t.
All they could tell us about the beef was that it was from England (which sure as hell doesn’t mean that they use organically reared shorthorn from Devon, dry-hang it for six weeks and butcher it themselves, but are too modest to say so), and it looked terrible: a mound of bright-red, sinewy slaughter waste on a saucer.
There were standard bought-in fishballs of the kind I used to buy from my local Chinese supermarket until I grasped the full horror of the unsustainable white-fish trawling that supplies them, and the meatballs were similarly untraceable protein bullets.
In the end Jermaine had some more tripe, which cooked well in the fiery hot stock, and the girls cooked some lettuce in the gentler of the two stocks. I tasted some and found it not bad at all, for boiled salad.
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The head waiter was cheery and well-informed, the others were a bit useless, and the £45 meursault was well-priced but badly made. The £21 Aussie riesling was a much better bottle in every way.
In the pub for last orders we decided we would probably not be going back to Bar Shu. But then, what do you know, by midnight we were outside banging on the doors, gurning and scratching our veins, and yelling for a little bag of Sichuan peppercorns.
Bar Shu
28 Frith Street, W1 (020-7287 8822)
Meat/fish: 2
Cooking: 7
Rush: 10
Score: 6.33
Price: About £100 for two with a bottle and service.
Yming
35-36 Greek Street, W1 (020-7734 2721)
Really gleaming little Chinese restaurant, beloved of the critics, and rightly so.
ECapital
8 Gerrard Street, W1 (020-7434 3838)
Low-key, excellent (if slightly declining) four-year-old Shanghainese. Order adventurously though, or don’t bother.
Click here to book a table at this restaurant
E-mail feedme@thetimes.co.uk and maybe we’ll go out for lunch