There is a revolution afoot in Chinese restaurants, this much we know to be true. Chinese restaurants in Britain, that is. In China, communist China, revolution is perpetual. So it’s no biggie there. You try to maintain the status quo in restaurants in actual China, you even look like being halfway conservative or nostalgic about your menus, service, interior decor, etc, they take your children away, put you through a mincer and spread you on the fields as fertiliser.
But in Britain, revolution has been slow to come. For the best part of for ever, there was nothing but Anglo-Cantonese to be found here, and it wheedled its way into our hearts. The menu offered essentially English dishes with the grammar rearranged and everything a bit more shiny. Beef in oyster sauce was only ever steak pie filling without the crust, sesame prawn toast is potted shrimps on dainty triangles of bread from which they have even gone so far as to remove the crusts before deep-frying, and sweet and sour pork is strawberry jam with pork in it, except you wouldn’t know it was pork, so it is in fact just strawberry jam.
But over the past few years – we know all this – some of the local cuisines of the most populous country on Earth have found their way onto our high streets: the odd Sichuan restaurant has opened up, the odd Shanghainese, some Hunanese, even a couple toting the wheaty northeastern scran of Dongbei.
We have gone crazy for these places, we critics. We neophytes. We pot-bellied boulevardiers of the jaded palate and the garlicky breath. We love the authenticity, the chilli-fire in the mouth, the curious offal, the difference from most other meals we eat, the opportunity to show off our skill with Wikipedia, pulling down all kinds of info on the food of places we’ve never been and will never go, the chance to preach the virtues of a humble little place with a Chinese-only menu that you’d have to be really adventurous and cool – to be honest, plain mental – to even dream of walking into.
But for whom are they really intended? It can’t just be us. There aren’t enough critics to keep a restaurant movement afloat. At least, not enough who pay their own bills.
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I’m just back from a spell doing some work in Los Angeles, and there the immigrant communities are so huge that a chap can open a restaurant serving the speciality of his weeny village in Mexico, Armenia or Nepal and there will be enough of his fellow countrymen within a drunken stagger to keep him in business for years. He doesn’t have to compromise for local palates; he need only replicate the flavours of home.
But it’s not like that here. Immigrant communities are for the most part smaller and less regionally diverse, and restaurants have to anglicise to get by. And so it’s all chicken and cashew nut, Peking duck with pancakes, egg fried rice and lemon chicken.
But then suddenly this rise of the locally specific place. Who are they for? Who?
My old and dear friend Erica Wagner, literary editor of this paper, spotted Local Friends on Bethnal Green Road. She had dropped in randomly for a soup (she lives local, and always has) and found the dumplings in it so exquisitely good, she had to call me immediately. Like when Commissioner Gordon simply has to get in touch with Batman. She beamed the old crossed chopsticks signal onto the black skies over Gotham and I dropped everything and ran.
It doesn’t look like much, which is always good. Bright new glowing white plastic signage, with loud red writing, loads of Chinese standing outside smoking. Red and black interior, Chinese writing on the walls. Exclusively Chinese clientele. Very sweet guy front of house: gently spoken, pierced, gastronomically enthusiastic, not your standard Chinatown Triad flunky at all.
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“These dishes at the front Cantonese, normal Chinese, like everywhere else,” he said, pointing to the first few pages of the bright A4 menu randomly scattered with colourful photos like a child’s summer project, and written mostly in Chinese. “These in pages with red outline Hunanese. Special. Verrrry spicy.”
He points to a photo of Chairman Mao pork, thick chunks of belly, slow-cooked with star anise and other stuff (I’ve seen it elsewhere as “Grandma Pork”; the credit is clearly spread around), and says, “This dish for example, very authentic, but lots of fat and skin so English not like.”
And this is the problem. They think we don’t like real food. They think we want it off the bone, fatless, filleted and barely spiced. It is very hard to persuade them that some of us want the proper stuff.
“I’ll leave it to him, I think,” I said to the table, which comprised Erica herself, her 12-year-old son, Theo, with a leather jacket over his school uniform, looking very much like a tiny Peter Parker out of Spider-Man, and my wife, Esther.
I always want to leave it to them when I do not know the cuisine so well. I don’t want to be served a watered-down version. I want what they eat. That is what will be best.
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“But I want some sesame prawn toast, too,” said Esther. “This all looks great, and I’m up for anything new, but I want some prawn toast.”
“And a portion of vegetarian spring rolls for Theo,” said Erica.
Right. Okay. Now. That’s fine. I want my friends to have what they want. I do. But the problem for me in a joint like this is that there I’ll be, trying to impress upon them how totally Hunanese I want it, and then starting off by asking for prawn toast and spring rolls.
But I do order them. Despite the fact that geographically and culturally there is no more sense asking for these things in a Hunanese restaurant than in a French one.
“Hunan food verrrry spicy,” said the guy. “This okay?”
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“Yes!” I said. “We love spice. You make it exactly as you’d have it yourself.”
“But, you know,” said Erica, “not too spicy.”
So there you go: prawn toast, spring rolls and some Hunanese dishes – not too spicy. There before my eyes was the living historical moment of the hybridising of ethnic food in London. That will be how it happened: the first places open, totally Chinese, in walks some postwar Cockney, “Got any ham pie, mate, none of your fancy peppery nonsense?” – “Yes, sir, very good, sir,” and old Wong runs into the kitchen and invents the thing that you think is Chinese.
The Hunanese food is very fine. A round of cold starters: some barely pickled cucumber, chunky, with red chilli flakes; pig’s ear slices in a tangle of spicy red dressing; wafer-thin spicy beef; a plate of sliced chicken thigh in a rich stock made high with red chilli and low with delicate soy. With these dishes one gets all the different spices and salts because of the coldness, like when you eat leftovers the morning after and really taste the herbs and spices you lovingly added but missed when the dish was hot. All of us are very happy.
They turn out not to have sesame prawn toast (which is great, because it means they don’t buy frozen whole dishes made off-premises, like your local does), but they send out some breaded prawns for us. For them.
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Then aubergine with French beans – perfect creamy texture on the aubergine, sweetness and softness in the beans, all the starchiness and squeak cooked off, but still al dente; stir-fried paper-thin pork with lots of green chillies; Chairman Mao pork, deep red and warm with the fat half and the sweet chewy skin an unctuous complement to the lean meat (though I notice at the edge of Esther’s and Erica’s bowls neat cubes of untouched fat – the kitchen will notice, too, perhaps, and make a note to trim the meat leaner in future).
Occasionally young black kids come in and say, “Do you do takeaway?” and leave happily with a bag of prawn crackers and some beef noodles. Erica’s husband, Francis, arrives late from a meeting, sits down, sighs, pours himself some tea and asks the waiter for sweet and sour pork and a lemon chicken.
Both dishes look good and very familiar, and he tucks in well. I pick at a heavily spiced foot of something, glance round the room at the Chinese tapping their phones and gobbling with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls, and ask myself again whom these wonderful new places are for.
And I guess they are for all of us.
Giles Coren’s How to Eat Out is now available, published by Hodder & Stoughton
Local Friends
132 Bethnal Green Road, London E2 (020-7729 9954)
Cooking: 7
Orr-fen-tissit-ee: 9
Service: 7
Score: 7.66
Price: normal Chinese, not a lot.