12 Macclesfield Street, London W1 (020 7437 8785) Meal for two, including wine and service, £70
The Dongbei region of northeast China is often referred to as the country's rust belt because of all the decaying industry there, and the food – or at least the version of it offered at Manchurian Legends – tastes like it. This is lunch for people who spend their days doing manly things with oxyacetylene welding equipment and unrefined petrochemicals. It is food for people who don't care how they smell afterwards and who have little regard for the delicacy of their palate. It is dinner in greasy overalls and steel toe-capped boots. I mean all this in a very good way.
Some dishes here are not new to London; the menu flirts with the meaty, barbecue styles of Xinjiang in the northwest, already offered up in a basic manner by Silk Road in Camberwell, south London. Similarly anyone who, like me, has thrilled to the recent arrival of full-on Sichuan and Hunan cooking in Britain will find themselves on familiar ground. The difference is that there is so much more of it here. Even allowing for a bout of Jewish over-ordering, I left feeling I had barely scraped the surface of the menu, while also knowing there were certain things I would be sneaking back alone to eat again. I mean, skewers of belly pork, under a snowfall of salt, cumin and chilli and grilled until the crisp fat fizzes and melts on the tongue, just has to be eaten often. Doesn't it?
Manchurian Legends is owned by the Restaurant Privilege group, which has some glossy Sichuan, Taiwanese and Japanese joints. This one is not at all glossy. We sat in the downstairs area in one of the three hard, dark wood booths, and set about filling the table. From the cold starters, a plate of fried spinach with peanuts and sliced green and red chillies felt like the culinary equivalent of jump leads: it woke everything up. Another of cold sliced five-spiced beef, with a dipping sauce made with a sweetish vinegar, was familiar from a few wedding buffets past. No matter. The same dipping sauce turned up with gloriously light pork and pickled vegetable dumplings. While rice is king elsewhere in China, in Dongbei wheat rules, leading to immense skills in the making of bread and dumpling skins.
Next, a few of those meaty skewers – to be eaten at once so the crisp fat does not solidify. Yours for £1.50 a piece. As in other Chinese traditions, there is an obsession with the inner bits of animals others leave behind. The huge list of dishes includes deep-fried pig's offal, stir-fried pig's intestines with leek (always good to have a few greens), stir-fried chicken gizzard and heart, and hot and spicy pig knuckle. We chose a hotpot of chicken kidneys and liver, which arrived in its own wok atop a burner. Where Sichuan food forefronts dried chillies, here it was hunks of fresh green and red which lent a brighter heat to proceedings. We left the chillies behind and picked out the knotty bits of bird offal from the fiery sauce and tried not to think about the number of chickens that had contributed to its depths.
Bang bang king prawn brought a pile of the things, shell on and skewered, beneath a heap of fried-off chillies, garlic and spring onions. You could be obsessive-compulsive and try to remove the shells, but what's the point? Strip the skewer with your teeth, head and all, says I. Best of the lot was the Xinjiang-style fried lamb. Lamb is considered almost too flavourful in most regions of China and so in Dongbei they subdue it under more drifts of salt, cumin, chilli, garlic and spring onions. This is food you will recall for a long time afterwards because your body won't shut up about it.
In a Chinatown where the standard Cantonese offerings have become stale and cynical, this newcomer is more than welcome. Just ensure you go there with a close friend, because strangers will recoil from you.
