28 Frith Street, London W1 (020 7287 8822).
Meal for two, including wine and service, £70-£120
A few minutes after learning of the opening, in London's Soho, of a new venture called Bar Shu, I had risen from my desk and hailed a cab to take me there for lunch. Some might regard this as bizarre behaviour; I consider it an entirely rational response to the arrival in the capital of a Chinese restaurant specialising in the food of Sichuan. The lucky people of Manchester (and Leeds) can access this sort of thing any time at the fabulous Red Chilli, but there has been nothing of this kind in the capital for years, if at all. Sichuan food is punchy and fiery, but also enticingly subtle. Flavours come in layers, and there is an interest in the wobblier inner bits of animals which is always attractive to me. I'm not sure I could ever really like someone who wasn't intrigued by a restaurant like Bar Shu.
My interest in the place was encouraged by the involvement as a consultant of the British food writer Fuchsia Dunlop. It is odd to give a Chinese restaurant credit for having a European on board, but Fuchsia is something special. The first Westerner to train at the famed Sichuan cookery school in Chengdu, she also wrote the fabulous Sichuan Cookery, a book like no other. If Fuchsia was involved, it was almost certainly the real thing.
Bar Shu did not disappoint, even though, being by myself, I was able to try very little: just a dish of long-braised pork in a dark, sweet sauce and some hot fried green beans with crumbs of pork, ginger, garlic and, of course, chillies. Almost all the other diners were Chinese and smoked enthusiastically over their lunch; the staff appeared pleased to see a European face showing interest. Huge steaming dishes of crab, pork knuckle and cuttlefish, swamped by chillies, kept passing by. The room, in shades of dark-brown wood and slate grey, with flashes of yellow and red, looks solid and businesslike. It resembles no other Chinese restaurant in London.
So a week later I went back, with two accomplices. Word had spread and the place was rammed, but we had booked and ordered in advance the Sichuan hotpot, because they serve only 10 of those a night. First, some cold appetisers: dark, long-marinated shards of beef, tasting first of dark caramel, then of sesame and finally of chilli heat. We tried thin strips of tripe in a dense, sweet, mouth-filling liquor so moreish that one of our party poured it into a bowl and drank it like a soup. We tried meaty lung slices, and then more of those crunchy, salty, garlicky green beans.
After that, the hot and fragrant whole crab, which was so beautiful we didn't know whether to eat it or hang it on the wall. Actually, nothing was going to stop us eating this sweet, fresh crab in a fiery sauce spiky with peanuts, ginger, whole cloves of garlic and spring onions. Certain Sichuan spices - the peppercorns, some of the chillies - have a slight anaesthetic effect which numbs the lips and makes the tongue tingle, so you don't just taste a dish like this, you also feel it. We sucked at the legs, and scooped the thick, custardy innards from the shell. We honoured that crab. We did justice to it. In short, one of my dishes of the year so far.
And then the hotpot: a divided container was placed on a burner on the table. On one side was a chicken broth, intense enough to make a Jewish mother proud. We were encouraged to drink that when we were done. On the other side, a vat of hot red oil, bubbling with peppercorns, more chillies and spices. If we drank it, the waiter said, we'd never taste anything ever again. Earlier, we had been given a sheet from which to choose the ingredients for our hotpot, and now they arrived: raw shell-on prawns and curls of fatty lamb; balls of minced beef with coriander and a plate of wobbly fungus; some glassy noodles, a little pork and slices of pig intestines, because that's the kind of boys we are.
We were in two minds about this dish. It was fun at first, as the liquors boiled and steamed and spat, and we tried to fish out what we had thrown in. And all the ingredients picked up the ripe flavours from whichever side they were cooked in. But it became wearisome and, when the bill arrived, we discovered we had spent almost £75 on this dish alone. That money might otherwise have been spent investigating the intriguing corners and byways of this unique menu. Oh well, I'll simply have to return. Many times.
