Chop Chop at the Hippodrome, Cranbourn Street, London WC2H 7JH. Tel: 020 7769 8888. Hippodromecasino.com. Starters £6 – £15.80; mains £11.80 - £60; desserts £5 - £7.50. Beer £5.50 a bottle. Wines from £27.50 a bottle.
In 1995, I flew to Las Vegas to interview a man who had become famous because the wife he had abused had cut off his penis. It had then been reattached. John Wayne Bobbitt was now attempting to build a career as a porn star. I went to talk to him about this venture over dinner at Wolfgang Puck’s Spago in Caesars Palace, although he turned out not to be much of a conversationalist. As research, I had to watch one of his films. He was also not much of a performer and the weirdly famous genitalia lacked a certain star wattage. It looked like it had received the attentions of a tree surgeon.
I was staying at the Luxor, an adult theme park of a hotel on the strip, housed in a black-glass pyramid and, to take my mind off all this, allowed myself to spend a couple of hundred bucks in the poker room. I did OK until I came up against a small white-haired lady of advanced years. She lost to me seven hands in a row, so on the eighth I went all in. She took every cent. Only then did I clock the glittering crust of diamond rings. After she left the table, I was told she was a local who regularly came into the casinos to clean out total losers like me.
By the time I returned to Las Vegas a decade later, the idea of the adult theme park that had begun to sprout with the Luxor was in full bloom. Now it was all about the theatres, the rides and most of all, the restaurants. It seemed as if every big-name chef both inside the US and out had a restaurant there: Joël Robuchon and Guy Savoy, Tom Colicchio, Thomas Keller and Gordon Ramsay. Sure, the punters might win occasionally at the tables, but they would then spend it all on dinner. Either way, the house wins. And so it continues. The $3.7bn Fontainebleau Las Vegas has just opened. It has 36 restaurants and bars.
The Hippodrome on London’s Leicester Square is not Las Vegas, but it does now seem to be operating on a similar principle. Tonight, there’s a mixed crowd on the brightly lit gaming floor at the heart of what was once one of London’s grand theatres. But given the proximity to Chinatown it is perhaps unsurprising that the Chinese community is strongly represented. Until recently, if they wanted something to eat between spins of the roulette wheel or a roll of the dice, they had to head outside to the Chinese restaurants on Lisle or Gerrard Street.
Now, they can just pop down to the basement. Last year, the Hippodrome opened Chop Chop, a Chinese restaurant run by the venerable Four Seasons group. As a longtime devotee of the Cantonese roast meats at the branch of Four Seasons at 12 Gerrard Street, this should be a shoo-in for me, not least because it’s open from 6pm until 4am and London is short on strong late-night eating options. Then again, I’ve always found the sight of the large gentlemen with metal detectors on the door of the Hippodrome a little offputting. I don’t enjoy being patted down for knives before dinner. To my embarrassment, I also assumed that when the casino moved in a few years ago, all sense of heritage moved out. I was completely wrong.
There’s a history of the building by the entrance, celebrating the fact that when it opened as the Talk of The Town in 1958 the first act was Eartha Kitt, who rose on to the stage sprawled on a vintage Rolls-Royce. The walls down to the restaurant are plastered with copies of posters from the early Hippodrome days celebrating performances by Harry Houdini and there are more in the loos promoting appearances by Billy Cotton and Jon Pertwee.
The restaurant itself is a mixture of moodily lit tables by an open kitchen and booths set against neon-gilded walls giving it a gentle Blade Runner vibe. But the key to the place appeared just after we sat down. His name is William Sin and he is a Soho legend who for 26 years was at the wonderful and much-missed Y Ming on Greek Street. He is one of those pros who makes a dining room better just by being in it. I had no idea he was now in charge here. At which point this review becomes less critical appraisal than tearful homecoming: a restaurant overseen by one of my favourite general managers, serving food from one of my favourite Chinese restaurant groups.
Oh yes, the food. The menu is shorter than at many of the places in Chinatown and the roast meats, which come from the Gerrard Street Four Seasons kitchen, are front and centre. Come here for half a lacquered Cantonese roast duck at £23.80, with dark, salty-savoury skin, perfectly rendered so it lifts easily away from the soft meat below. Ask for it bone in. Use the dark sweet soy liquor as a lubricant for your rice or thin noodles with bean sprouts. Or have the belly pork, with crackling like honeycomb.
We start with marble-white, translucent prawn dumplings, which are squeakily fresh and scallops, complete with their roe, steamed on the shell with a tangle of glass noodles. There’s a seafood stir-fry with crunchy slices of lotus root looking like decorations from a midcentury modern home and, for pure comfort, long-braised aubergine in a rich sauce, thickened with minced pork, though you can have it meat free. There’s a short but strong list of seafood dishes including various ways with whole lobster for £60, for those who have just raked it in upstairs. Or come for a comforting bowl of soup noodles with roast meats for £16, perhaps at 3am.
We drink Chinese beer from dimpled half-pint glasses and share a yuzu cheesecake from a short list of Japanese desserts brought in from elsewhere. We applaud the little robot waiter, which is stacked with our finished plates and then trundles away towards the kitchen. Chop Chop is not the only food option in the building. There’s the Heliot Steak House and a sandwich place overseen by sandwich maven Max Halley, which, like the gaming tables, is open 24 hours. But this Chinese in a casino is the place to which I’ll return. I’d now come up with some gag about it not being a gamble, but as a writer I have my pride.
News bites
The Museum of the Home in London’s Hoxton is holding what they’re calling a Winter Yard Sale on 26 November to raise funds for their Food Equality Campaign for Change, focused on reducing food insecurity for Londoners. The campaign, which is led by Evening Standard restaurant critic Jimi Famurewa, aims to raise £50,000. The sale will involve a mixture of big-name brands like fabric and wallpaper company Colefax and Fowler and Allday Goods, which fashions knives from recycled materials, alongside local makers. Tickets start at £5 (museumoftheome.org.uk).
One for the number crunchers. Deliveroo has just reported that their UK orders rose 3% year on year in the third quarter of 2023, to 38.3m. Meanwhile for the same period their rival Just Eat reported their orders had dropped 3% to 60.8m. Both companies reported that their gross transaction value was up. For Deliveroo it was £1.026bn, a rise of 9%. For Just Eat, which quotes in Euros because of its business in Ireland, it was €1.667bn, up 4%.
Cardiff Ramen kings Matsudai have once again joined forces with Japanese food geek Tim Anderson to create two new limited edition ramen kits, which will be available for delivery across the UK in November. The kits, which draw on recipes from Anderson’s new book Ramen Forever, are for a Spicy Hokkaido Curry Ramen, and a Vegan Spicy Miso Curry Ramen and cost £15.99 and £14.99 respectively (matsudai.co.uk).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
