Wun’s Tea Room and Bar 23 Greek Street, London W1D 4DZ (020 8017 9888). Snacks and small plates £2.80-£9.80, larger dishes £11.80-£18.80, desserts £4.80-£5.80, wines from £22.80
It is tempting to shove just five words at you and leave it at that: sugar skin Iberico char siu. Mouth them, like some florid incantation: Sugar. Skin. Iberico. Char. Siu. It is not just char siu, that boisterous Cantonese way with roasted pork, involving the aromatics of five spice punched up with fermented bean curd and honey. It is char siu fashioned from Iberico pork, prized for its thick gilding of glistening, ivory fat. No, it’s more than that. It is Iberico char siu with a crisp, sugared skin. Some of you, the pork-eating ones obviously, may feel you need this in your life. I need this in my life.
At Wun’s Tea Room and Bar on a corner site in London’s Soho, they serve it just above room temperature and so well rested, it seems to dissolve obligingly on the tongue, leaving just a gust of savoury piggyness and sweet shop sugar, as if whispering, “Do not forget me.” I take another piece, and another. A serving costs £14.80 – every single price ends with 80p – which is a few quid more than you’ll pay in Chinatown, over on the other side of Shaftesbury Avenue. Fair enough. It’s better than the char siu available over there.
Wun’s, from the team behind steamed bao specialists Bun House, is a logical development of the UK’s Chinese restaurant sector. For decades Chinese food in Britain meant Cantonese food, often slicked in addictively sweet sauces, because a significant number of the chefs responsible for cooking it had come here from Hong Kong. With the opening up of China over the past few years, we became aware that it’s a country of many provinces, each with their own distinct cooking style.
So we rolled our eyes at the apparently banal familiarities of Cantonese and babbled excitedly instead about the fire and punch of the food of Sichuan or Hunan. We cooed over steaming hot pots and skewered meats crusted with chilli and cumin and ribbon noodles from Xinjiang. I say “we”. I mean, I did that. I babbled a lot. The expansion of the Chinese food experience in the UK has been thrilling. I have become skilled at picking through heaps of dried red chillies in search of the fragrant joys within. I have been serious and committed.
It was inevitable, therefore, that somebody would decide it was time to swing the pendulum back towards applauding the many virtues of the food of Canton, which is what owners Z He and Alex Peffly have done here. Pass through the upstairs tea room with its artfully distressed brickwork, and head into the basement with its down-lit cocktail bar and its jade green walls and its midcentury modern music cabinet.
On the table you will find a drinks menu in the form of a 12-page newspaper. It’s tightly printed, graphically excitable and frankly baffling. There’s a bunch of cocktails, with names that read like word spaghetti: Devilwood and Aged Tangerine, or Mango and Sago, or Salted Lime and Rice? Nope. No idea. There’s a list of Chinese beers with their own thrilling titles: North Cloud Yunnan black lager or Monkey King amber ale. There’s another of whisky, a section of baijiu, their own rice wines, gin and tea. There’s a lot of tea, and a ceremony to go with it. Apparently, every single beverage comes direct from China. Donald Trump would hate it. So there’s that. They offer a gin gimlet. I ask for one made with vodka, but they can’t do that because they have no vodka. Fair enough. It’s not bad if a little sweet.
The food menu is a paper checklist, and relatively short. I set to work with a pencil, tongue clasped between teeth in concentration. The result is a mixed experience. The highs are very high indeed. I will return for these dishes, probably by myself so I don’t have to share them. Alongside the char siu are “wind shelter” fried chilli sardines. The crisp-skinned fish rest in a heap of dried red chillies and a golden crumb of salty deep-fried garlic. You eat them and worry that your breath will scare away small children the next day. Then you realise that being scared is character-building for small children, so you don’t care.
Their “finger licking” barbecue beef spare ribs are broad flat slices, sawn through the bone (in a way familiar from Korean barbecue). They are heavily sauced, all dark sweet soy stickiness, with huge bone-nibblage potential. You will indeed lick your fingers, because they are impossible to manage with chopsticks. The star dish, and the most expensive at £18.80, is “My gran’s secret recipe sour plum braised duck”, which is a serious come-on but justified. It’s a big steaming bowl of soft meat and crumbling potatoes in a savoury gravy that you’ll want to dab behind your ears. We have rice, piled with pieces of fried lardo and shallots and served in a claypot so hot the rice is starting to crisp at the bottom. Scraping down there with a spoon becomes a mission. I am determined to complete it.
Not everything delights. The skewers here – a few trimmed green beans, lined up to look like a raft, a curl of chicken skin, some weirdly unfatty lamb belly – feel like an afterthought and are not particularly good value at £2.80 each. Whole prawns wrapped in spring roll pastry, deep fried and served with a wasabi mayonnaise, are a little greasy. And brussels sprouts in a bland sauce are a reminder of the days when this vegetable was a cruel and unusual punishment meted out to kids. There is, however, a sprightly salad of peanut and crisped noodles to take away the taste.
We finish with their egg custard tarts, which are heavy on friable pastry, light on custard and not entirely worth hanging around for. Pop down to one of Soho’s ice-cream parlours instead.
Service is cheery if haphazard. Order your dishes in batches, otherwise they will throw everything at you at once. And the cocktail bar doesn’t seem able to keep up with the kitchen; our drinks are ordered long before we order the food, but turn up five minutes after it arrives. That said, compared to most of the waiters working the rooms over on Gerrard Street, where customers are regarded as a dreary inconvenience to be tolerated, those at Wun’s are a delight. Plus, there’s the sugar skin Iberico char siu. Though I may already have mentioned that.
News bites
A short stroll away from Wun’s, over on the newly reconditioned piazza at the east end of Gerrard Street is Jinli. It’s named after a famous street in Chengdu and accordingly much of the menu is Sichuan, boldly executed. Go with enough friends to explore the lengthy list of dry pot dishes, and the whole sea bass with chilli sauce. Unlike many of Chinatown’s restaurants, it’s a light, bright, high-ceilinged space jinli.co.uk.
The Photographers’ Gallery in London’s Soho is staging ‘Feast for the Eyes’, an exhibition, previously staged in New York, examining the history of food in photography. The show, which includes work by Man Ray, Cindy Sherman, Weegee and Martin Parr, stretches from food in fine art photography through commercial and scientific images to journalism and fashion. From 18 October tpg.org.uk.
For some reason it’s always 52% of the population which gets it wrong. According to a survey of 2,000 people by Village Hotel Club, 52% of us think jam should go on scones first, followed by the cream. Obviously, this is nuts. The 25% that think it should be the other way around are right (19% really couldn’t care less).
Jay Rayner will be appearing in a special Guardian Live event at London’s Cadogan Hall on 9 September. In My Last Supper, the show accompanying the book of the same name, Jay examines our fascination with last meals and tells the story of his own. Click here for tickets. To order a copy of My Last Supper for £11.99 (normal price £16.99), go to guardianbookshop.com
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
