Haozhan
Address: 8 Gerrard Street, London W1
Telephone: 020 7434 3838
Meal for two, including service: £80
Haozhan is a pleasant restaurant staffed by nice waiters, with an interesting menu of well-prepared dishes. And most remarkably, it is on Gerrard Street, the main drag of London's Chinatown. Nice waiters? Interesting menu? Well-prepared dishes? Nobody goes to Gerrard Street for that these days. They go there to be shouted at by aggressive staff with personality disorders, and to eat food that will make them wake up the next morning feeling like a cat has slept in their mouth.
True, the service in Chinatown always left something to be desired. I remember, nearly 20 years ago, eating a meal on Gerrard Street where the food took so long to arrive the sizzling dishes had gone sizzleless before reaching us. The waiters were so contemptuous of us that they made the noise with their lips as they brought the food to the table. When we refused to pay the pre-added tip, cooks clutching machetes came out of the kitchen to make sure we left. Quickly. Oh, happy days. But this, like the pathologically angry waiters at Wong Kei, was part of the pantomime. Generally though, a thriving Chinese population here ensured the food would be good if not excellent.
In the past 10 years, increased competition, causing a shortage of skilled chefs combined with an obsession with the bottom line, has resulted in a charge down market at such speed it's only a surprise the restaurateurs haven't all got nosebleeds. The waiters on Gerrard Street are, for the most part, still aggressive and rude, but the food no longer excuses it. All the good Chinese places in London are generally not in Chinatown: the Royal China Group, Hakkasan and Yauatcha, Shanghai Blues, Taiwan Village and Snazz Sichuan. My old favourite Yming and the new arrival Bar Shu may be only just across Shaftesbury Avenue in Soho but that location is a declaration of intent. It says: believe us, we are not like that shower over there.
But then there's Haozhan, whose chef, Chee Loong Cheong, used to work at Hakkasan, and where the menu doesn't just tour the predictable Cantonese staples but flirts with the occasional Japanese or Thai flavour. It even looks different: instead of going for decor reminiscent of your auntie's in Penge, like all the others on the strip, this one is modern with lots of clean lines, the walls fitted with mirrors and jade-green panels. And, whisper it, the waiters smile.
The kitchen has a particular talent for deep frying, to produce items that are crisp but greaseless. A starter of crispy quail with chilli and salt, a dish familiar to me from Hakkasan's sister restaurant Yautatcha but available here at two-thirds of the price, brought two whole birds in a light, crisp batter sprinkled with aromatics which managed not to overwhelm the gaminess of the birds. Curry soft-shell crab sounded distinctly worrying (which was why we ordered it) but happily wasn't, the delicate creatures gently battered and sprinkled with shards of a fiery spice mix. My companion and I were divided over the spare ribs with a coffee sauce, which is to say he thought them odd in a bad way and I thought them odd in a good way. Yes, there was a bitterness to the sweet glaze on the thick meaty ribs, but also a certain fragrance which reminded me of rosemary. My friend's uncertainty didn't trouble me. It meant I got to finish them.
We agreed about the star dish, the silver cod with a dry XO sauce of minced prawns and chillies. The generous slabs of fish had first been sealed off, but so sensitively that as you cut through the outer skin, the huge flakes of pearly fish fell apart. The XO part of this plateful simply cut through the richness. I would come here for this dish alone.
Some other things didn't startle, such as underpowered scallops with macadamia nuts and stir-fried vegetables including a surfeit of out-of-season asparagus. The latter also turned up in a dish of Szechuan vegetables, which was more notable for the strands of silky tofu. Haozhan makes its own tofu, and there's a whole list of dishes using it which we should have tried but didn't.
Convinced the Haozhan cooks were gods of the deep-fat fryer, we ordered their deep-fried ice cream, not least because it sounded like the sort of thing which would earn an indulgent mother a parenting order if she served it up to her kids. I'm not sure it isn't, the ice cream buried under a sugared donut-like shell. Perhaps it's best avoided in favour of their calming and light pumpkin cream. As to Haozhan, it may well be the only good reason to visit Gerrard Street right now.
