The Shard, 31 St Thomas Street, London SE1 (020 7478 0540). Meal for two, including wine and service £200
It was while I was having a wee at Hutong that I finally understood the point of it all. The restaurant occupies the 33rd floor of the Shard, by London Bridge, which I'm meant to hate but don't. I love cities. I love their audacity and shamelessness. I love the way the Shard stands as an enormous raised middle digit to the rest of town. It's a pulsing lump of architectural Viagra. The only problem with eating inside the Shard is you can't see the Shard.
Which brings me back to the business of weeing there. The floor-to-ceiling windows continue into the loos. As nobody can see you up here they've put the urinals up against the glass. It truly is a loo with a view. I don't think I've ever urinated to a better vista. They have enhanced even the most basic element of eating there.
And that is the point of it. Hutong is the London outpost of a revered restaurant of the same name in Hong Kong. It is a high-end take on the fiery food of northern China, with a few other less-ballsy dishes because rich people like them. The space is all intricate lattice work and carved doors dropped inside the hard box of the building. It's less restaurant than production design: part stage set for the next Bond, part Cadbury's Flake advert.
The prices are unconscionable. They are ludicrous, a poke in the eye from a chopstick dipped in salty Korean chilli sauce. The restaurant is only affordable if you wear knickers lined in baby panda fur on a daily basis, rather than just for pulling. A whole Peking duck for £58? Why, of course. £10 for dry-fried green beans with minced pork, and £11 for fried rice with the hit of salted fish? It's all yours.
I can suggest other places where you could get versions of these dishes at less than half the price. Ba Shan in Soho or Red Chilli in Manchester for the serious-chilli stuff from Hunan and Sichuan provinces; Four Seasons on Gerrard Street in Soho if you hanker after roast duck, yours for £20 in the kind of sweet-savoury sauce you would want to lick off a friend. Even the dry-fried green beans/minced pork combo is now on the menu at the most banal Cantonese places.
All that is to miss the point of Hutong. First, apart from the "comfortably numb" cocktail, full of Sichuan peppercorns – it looked like norovirus in a glass and tasted like it was made by someone who hates me – the food is generally very good. Ignore the prices, the fact you can see the locations of 50 food banks from up here, and there's lots to enjoy. There are thin slices of crisp cucumber interleaved with cold pork belly, to be dipped in a deep, toasty, fermented bean sauce with a hit of minced ginger and garlic; translucent discs of raw scallop with the invigorating bash of bitter citrus; de-boned marinated, braised and deep-fried lamb ribs, with fragile skin like baked nori seaweed; fat prawns with a seriously ill-mannered whack of chilli and peppercorns.
And then there is the duck, which comes complete with the theatre of table-side carving, shards of caramel-crisp skin fluttering on to the plate inside the Shard. Pancakes are gossamer thin. I complained when they tried to remove the carcass without giving me the parson's nose. The waiter laughed and said, "That's what my mother would do." And that's the other point. Service here is lovely: engaged and relaxed where in other Chinese places it rarely reaches beyond the functional.But the view is not a mere add on to this. As with my pee break it provides meaning. It is integral to being here. Put this food at ground level and, at these prices, a baying mob would quickly gather. But up here with the crystal gash of London spread out beneath you, instant memories are made; a Tuscan sun dunks itself in the river and for a moment, even as your wallet lightens, all is right with the world.
