Restaurant Review: Yipin

Any regular readers of the blog will probably have noticed the slew of Sichuanese restaurants that I have reviewed around London and my love of Chinese food in general.  Well then, imagine my excitement when walking home along Liverpool Road I wandered past Yipin.  It doesn't look like much from the outside, but on looking at the menu in the window I was happy to find Sichuan classics like pock marked old woman's bean-curd, boiled fish slices and hot and numbing beef.  On closer investigation of the menu online, however, I found that though the Sichuanese is reputedly good, Yipin actually specialises in Hunanese food, a cuisine still heavy on the chilli, but without the numbing peppers and a bit more fond of a dash of sugar.

Eat Bangkok: Chinatown

So my rules when I travel are that I only eat local food (unless it is awful/consists of two dishes, though I'm not going to name and shame here).  My one exception to this is places that have large immigrant populations with great food of their own.  Imagine my joy then when I learnt that a full 15% of Thailand's population is Chinese and that Bangkok's Chinatown is one of the biggest anywhere in the world.  To quote Charlie Sheen; 'Winning!'

Mama Lan

For me hearing the combination of Beijing street food and Brixton market is pretty much like putting crack and a crack pipe in front of a drug addict at this point.  My favourite place to eat in London with some of my favourite food from when I used to be fun and travel a lot (wistful sigh... also please no comments that I never used to be fun).  Mama Lans also has the benefit of being setup by a blogger, so obviously its getting immediate points, it's also a family mother and daughter enterprise - so all very positive and cosy.  So how was it?

In short pretty good.  The cold slow cooked beef came in thin slices with a good star anise flavour as well as a lot of other warm, autumnal spicing, very nice and tender, still moist enough despite the fact that chilling has a drying effect on meat.  The pickles were great, and the dumplings were good.  It was especially fun watching them being hand rolled infront of us the whole time we were there, given the counter puts you practically on top of the kitchen.  The only dissapoinment was that despite the filling being good the dumplings were pretty underseasoned.  At this point, however, I think it's fair to put that down to teething problems given Mama Lans had only been open for a couple of days.  I will definitely go back and try this place again.

Restaurant Review: Dragon Castle

There's a regeneration scheme, there's great transport links, there's a new big tall building with expensive flats in it (that I was told have sold pretty poorly, but who knows) but what is there to do.  Bad house music I suppose, but apart from that Elephant and Castle doesn't have an enormous amount going on.  But what it does have is a fantastic Cantonese restaurant in the shape of Dragon Castle.  Though they seem to use a bit much MSG for my liking - although it is delicious, I still feel like it's cheating and it can obscure more subtle flavours - the cooking here is good, the service friendly and the interior is very reminiscent of similar types of restaurants in Southern China.  

Restaurant Review: Leong's Legends II

I used to love going to Chinatown.  When I was little I used to go their for dim sum with my dad.  Sadly Chinatown often gets a pretty poor rap.  This is often deserved, with a lot of places serving up fairly poor gloopy food.  Just as often, however, reviewers will say that if you stick to a particular set of regional specialities which reflect where the chef's are from you can eat very well.  Leong's Legends  (II was built later to cater for demand) is just one of those places.  Leong's specialises in Taiwanese food, though  looking at the menu gives little initial indication of this as it spans the gamut of regional Chinese cuisines There is for instance a heavy focus on Sichuanese, which is perhaps unsuprising given the success of places such as Bar Shu.  However, the Taiwanese items are easy to spot as they correspond to the recommended starred items and we stuck almost completely to these.

Restaurant Review: The Old China Hand

There's not many independent pubs around these days.  Even less with a list of around thirty different beers from around the world.  And certainly basically none with a ping-pong table.  Well the Old China Hand has all of these things and it serves dim-sum along with all that beer.  Sadly no one's going, which is a shame because it's a nice place.

Gourmet San Part 2

Last time I went to Gourmet San I said I was impressed, but needed to go back before I made a final verdict.  Sadly that verdict is one born out of  disappointment with what was at best an average meal.  Things were going badly from the off as we were led to a small, secluded room upstairs away from the fun and bustling main room.

Restaurant Review: Gourmet San

Finding places to rent means a lot of talking to estate agents who don't have anything you want and then ring you for weeks after asking if it was a 3 bedroom for September that you wanted.  No it wasn't, that must have been someone else, and could you please STOP RINGING ME!  On the plus side you do go to parts of town you don't often visit (at least not during the day) and that means you get to eat at new places.  This led me to find a place that did amazing cupcakes, it also meant I got to try Gourmet San in Bethnal Green, somewhere I've been reading about for a while.

Restaurant Review: Chilli Cool

Since a couple of friends were celebrating their birthdays in the Big Chill House in King's Cross I thought it would be a good excuse to go and have dinner at Chilli Cool, a local Sichuanese style Chinese restuarant. I've been their once before, but it was a bit of a rushed affair, so this time I thought it would be nice to linger over it a little more.

By the time I met 3 friends at the station I just wanted to get indoors and out of the rain. Thankfully one of them had the biggest umbrella I've ever seen, sort a marquee on a stick. Wonderful planning on his part, except it did mean he had to walk in the road every time we came to a lamp-post because otherwise it would get stuck between them and the wall running along the other side. Still given the dismal weather it was nice to see the steamed up windows of the restaurant. When we got in we were faced with a simple but busy place with a small front section and a far larger back room and an amazingly pungent smell of fried chillis and copious amounts of Sichuan pepper that hit everyone right in the back of the throat. After a little bit of coughing we got used to it and asked how long it would be for a table. We got told 2 to 3 minutes which turned into twenty, but the benefit of this was that we had all chosen dishes to share. This combination of chilli and Sichuanese pepper is what this type of Chinese food is known for, and has been made far more known in the UK by food writer Fuchsia Dunlop.

Restaurant Review: Silk Road

Well at least my friend’s ex-boyfriend was good for something. He found out about Silk Road here and after having a look at all the glowing comments I got pretty excited about going there for her birthday dinner. I really enjoy Chinese food, having travelled there a couple of times. The truism for London, however, is that it’s nearly impossible to get anything authentic and its all a sweet sticky mess laden with MSG. This is now pretty unfair. Places like Bar Shu and Ping Pong are helping and are definitely bringing Chinese into a more fashionable mainstream. But its places like this that I find really exciting. It’s a small plain restaurant with a few wall hangings showing the Gobi Dessert with a few benches in a pretty humdrum location in Camberwell that if I hadn’t been recommended I probably would have walked right past it. Don’t get me wrong I like London’s well furnished, styalised restaurants as well, its just that there is something really exciting about coming into a small simple place like this and being presented with a really great meal.