Mandarin Kitchen, 14-16 Queensway, London W2 3RX (020 7727 9012; mandarin.kitchen). Starters and soups £4.30-£13.90, large plates £8.90-£55 (for sharing), desserts £4.20-£8.20, wines from £27.90
London has many Chinatowns. They may not be as extensive as the throng around Gerrard Street, but they are very much there. When I was a kid, deep-braised in the sweet soy broth of privilege, my family would go once a year, just after Christmas, to the theatre; to bathe in the spot-lit thrill of the overture, the sequin and the jazz hand. As is the non-observant Jewish way at that time of year, we would eat Chinese. It was usually somewhere in the small Chinatown at the southern end of Queensway, hard by Hyde Park, where intense men stood in the windows hand-pulling noodles, both as kitchen prep and come-hither marketing. They had to do it somewhere. They might as well do it in front of an audience.
But time and fashion move on. Each generation rediscovers a city for themselves. Rarely did I eat on Queensway. I might happily review restaurants located at the very extremities of the United Kingdom. But home turf is a different place and I have always been a little suspicious of everything to the left of Marble Arch. Then a few months back I wanted somewhere to eat before a show at the Royal Albert Hall. Pink Martini – fabulous gig. The choices around our greatest concert hall are depressingly thin, so I looked north to the other side of Hyde Park. Which is how I found myself as a walk-in at the seafood temple that is Mandarin Kitchen, amid Queensway’s tiny Chinatown. I quickly recalled that it was where we used to go as a family back in the 80s, for many great things, including a huge heap of broken-up crab with ginger and spring onion. We regarded the mess left on the tablecloth afterwards as a mark of both achievement and family culture. This was who we were.
I made a bit of a happy mess again. It wasn’t the deep-fried baby squid with garlic and chilli. That was tidy. If any crumbs fell off the rustling pile of crisply battered tentacle and ring, I had ’em. The salty rubble of fresh red chilli and garlic went, too. You can get a lot of adhesion between a fat finger pad and that stuff, especially off a linen tablecloth. No, it was the whole steamed Dover sole in ginger and spring onion that caused the stains, as I filleted it off the bone, spraying fin and sauce hither and yon. It’s listed on the menu at “market price”. Don’t be embarrassed about asking them what that price is, because they won’t be embarrassed to tell you. Currently it’s £38, as compared to £48 at Scott’s and £65 at Wiltons. And oh my: the cooking of that fish was perfect. There’s nothing mushy here. It’s all sweet, tense fillet, slipping off the frame, like a silk dressing gown off a comely shoulder.
In a city where restaurants come and go, Mandarin Kitchen has thrived. It first opened in 1978, a project between restaurateur Helen Li and seafood trader Stephen Cheung. It’s still run by the next generation of the Cheung family and this year will celebrate its 45th anniversary. A few years ago it had a makeover, creating a clean space of whitewashed curving vaults as if in a set of space-age railway arches. There are soft banquettes and downlighters and staff who appear genuinely pleased to see you. Making generalisations about the waiters in particular types of restaurants is risky, but it’s fair to say that a lot of central London’s Chinese establishments are staffed by brilliant people prized for their briskness and efficiency, rather than necessarily their warmth. Here, you get the whole package.
I accidentally fell into Mandarin Kitchen a second time within a few weeks and ordered it all again because I wasn’t reviewing and it was my money and nobody was looking. Eventually, I decided a third, more formal visit was in order, not least to have the dish for which they are most famous: a whole lobster broken up over a pile of soft, thin noodles in a banging ginger and spring onion sauce. It’s copied all over the world now, but they claim creation rights and I’m not going to argue. It costs a hefty £55, but will feed two with room to spare. In any case, if anybody tells you they’ve found a cheap source of lobster, back away. There is no such thing as a good cheap lobster.
Ask for extra napkins for when you pick up the shells, coated in that lightly gelatinous sauce and give in to the urge to suck the sweet meat from the shell. Follow it with the peppery hit of the sliced ginger. It is that rare thing, the very comforting and the luxurious all in one. This time I had the Dover sole fried with dried chilli and onion, another inhouse creation. The fillets had been taken off the bone and the entire skeleton lightly battered and deep fried so it had curled into a crispy gondola, which may be the best kind of gondola. The fish had then been turned in a sweet, chilli-hot soy glaze and returned to the golden frame, with translucent petals of onion and lots of chillies. We alternated between pieces of fish with bits of the crunchy bones cracked off with our fingers. More napkins were sacrificed.
We had other things, including a soothing tangle of monk’s beard in oyster sauce, and scallops steamed on the shell amid a nest of rice vermicelli with a soy dipping sauce. Best of all was a slab of steamed minced pork with salted fish, fragrant with ginger and sesame oil. It is like being given a chunk of the inside of pork dumplings. We sipped thimbles of tea and celebrated making another mess and at the end had ivory cubes of almond bean curd, which is chilled and jelly-like and a little odd. We also had toffee bananas, which are crunchy spheres of childlike wonder. We were asked if we wanted ice-cream with that. It’s illegal to say no to a question like that, isn’t it?
I recognise there’s an element of nostalgia gilding this review. My parents are both long gone, but here, at the table, was a whispered echo of those family visits when we would mount an armed assault on the crab without shame or embarrassment and adore being us. But none of that obscured the fact that Mandarin Kitchen has survived all these years for one simple reason: it’s seriously good.
News bites
Hrishikesh Desai has announced his departure from Gilpin Hotel and Lake House in the Lake District after eight years as executive chef across the resort’s three restaurants. He is being replaced by three chefs, each of whom will run a restaurant independently. Aakash Ohol has been promoted internally and will be joined by Ollie Bridgwater, formerly of the Fat Duck, and Tom Westerland, of Lucknam Park. Owner Barney Cunliffe has also announced a revised and more robust sustainability strategy (thegilpin.co.uk).
For the whole of January Jacob Kenedy of Bocca di Lupo in London’s Soho is teaming up with food writer Rachel Roddy to celebrate the publication of her new book An A to Z of Pasta. They have chosen five dishes from across Italy, the initials of which spell out ‘An A to Z’. It starts with a fritto misto platter from Ancona, including breaded and fried lamb chops and olives stuffed with pork and veal, and finishes in Zafferana Etnea, with a liqueur-soaked, saffron-glazed cassata siciliana sponge cake with sweet ricotta and candied fruits from Sicily (boccadilupo.com).
Norfolk chef Charlie Hodson has opened what he believes is the smallest restaurant in the country. Hodson and Co in Aylsham, which was originally a deli, has been open for four nights a week since November and is available to be booked for a single reservation of anywhere between two and 20 people, who will all be served an eight-course tasting menu (hodsonco.co.uk).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
• This article was amended on 8 January 2023. An earlier version suggested the battered Dover sole fillets resembled a gondolier, when “gondola” was intended. The first News Bite entry has also been amended to correct some inconsistencies.
